December 7, 2022
City Under One Roof by Iris Yamashita
A group of teens living in an isolated Alaskan town find a boot with a dismembered foot on the shoreline. This is a frequent occurrence and the gruesome find is chalked up to a suicide or someone who fell off a cruise ship. But when an Anchorage detective hears about the discovery, she wonders if it is related to the disappearance of her husband and son a year earlier. She travels to the town, only to be stranded by a snowstorm and avalanche. With nothing else to do, she begins digging into the town and its residents.
This starts out as a nice "locked room" mystery with a limited number of characters who live in the same building in the same tiny town. Everyone is stranded by the snowstorm, unable to leave. There is even a moose named Denny. But about 2/3 of the way in, the author introduces a group of characters from a nearby Native American village (the "Rez Men," who she takes great pains to emphasize are NOT Native American) who are able to move about and come and go as they please. They all sound like their dialog is from a 1950s B-movie. I'm sure the author liked all of her characters and didn't want to make one of them the bad guy so she decided to pin it on someone from outside the town, but I hate it when authors do this. It's a cop-out.
Also, the two detectives are conducting a thorough investigation up until this point, but at the 2/3 mark, they suddenly get stupid. Instead of thoroughly searching the town and surrounding area for two children who go missing, including the nearby abandoned military compound (hint, hint), they decide to hop on snowmobiles and go search the Native American village that is two hours away.
The ending is just two unbelievable. The reader is supposed to believe that the murder victim in a tiny isolated town was somehow involved with the deaths of the detective's husband and son. How unbelievable is that?? Talk about a stretch.
And why does Cara, the female detective, start seeing and talking to ghosts, including her dead husband? I know she is supposed to have PTSD, but ghosts have nothing to do with the story and an editor should have cut out those parts. It pisses me off when authors portray women as weak-minded. The male detective doesn't hear or see anything supernatural.
Yamashita tried to deal with too many big issues: domestic abuse, drugs, poverty, suicide, illegal immigration, PTSD, the plight of many Native Americans. These are all important topics, but pick one (or two, at the most) and work with it.
Disappointing.
Many thanks to Edelweiss and the publisher for providing an eARC for review.
Talkeetna, Alaska, where this novel does NOT take place
