City Under One Roof by Iris Yamashita is about a detective who travels to a remote city in Alaska after a severed hand and foot is discovered. Amy, a local teenager, discovers the washed up limbs on the shore of her small town of Point Mettier, Alaska. Cara Kennedy is a detective from Anchorage but she decides to investigate the case. Cara has her own motives for wanting to investigate the case, even if it means visiting the isolated place that can only be accessed by a tunnel.
As Cara is claustrophobic, the environment really affects her and she can’t wait to finish her investigation and leave. However, a blizzard causes the tunnel to close for the foreseeable future. Cara is stuck among the 205 residents who all live in the same high rise building. The residents are acting oddly and they don’t trust outsiders. They try to protect their own and look out for each other.
She teams up with Point Mettier police officer Joe Barkowski to investigate the crime. Things take a turn for the worse, when a local drug gang from a nearby native village descends on the residents. Cara is caught in the middle and doesn’t know if she can trust the residents as she investigates. There are two things she does know: everyone is hiding something, and someone is willing to kill to keep the secrets hidden.
I thought the book was a fast paced and interesting read. The book was narrated by three different female characters: Amy, a local resident who discovered the body; Cara, the detective ; and Lonnie, a young woman with anxiety and eccentric behaviors who also resides in Point Mettier. The characters were interesting and all flawed but they would stop at nothing to protect themselves and their loved ones. I like that the book was narrated by each character because it gave us a wider view of the broader story than we would have gotten if we just read the story from Cara’s point of view.
The story spent a lot of time fleshing out each character and introducing a lot of different story lines. At times, it was hard keeping track of the different character and story arcs. I felt that the book ended with a lot of questions that were left unanswered. I believe that the author is planning for a sequel, otherwise, the ending is very disappointing. The author did leave a hook and opening for the readers to guess where the sequel might be about but I wish that a few of the questions were answered in this book too.
