I chose this book for a Reading Challenge because it was on my Wish List anyway and it just sounded good,  but I think I expected a good old-fashioned PI story set in the wilds of Alaska. As I got into it the plot and character Yamashita’s debut novel got better and better.  

City Under One Roof
by Iris Yamashita 
2023 / 
Read by Aspen Vincent, Shannon Tyo, Anna Caputo
8h 9m 
Rating: B / mystery 

I think I expected a good old-fashioned PI story, but what I got was way more than that. Mettier, Alaska is fictional but based on a small town called Whitter which is about 60 miles east of Anchorage. The town has one big living complex where a total of maybe 300 people live.  They get there via a tunnel through a mountain and there’s another tunnel to the school.  Check out the bottom of this book review: https://lesasbookcritiques.com/city-under-one-roof-by-iris-yamashita/

But unlike Whittier,  Point Mettier is like a clichéd book jacket blurb which reads “everyone has their secrets.”  LOL! – Very true here, why else would folks live in such a remote and inhospitable place?  

The fictional “city under one roof” is called Point Mettier in real life and it’s at the very northern part of Alaska,  up by Point Barrow.Closer to Anchorage there is a town called Whittier where most of the 300 residents live under the one roof of an old US Army Corps of Engineers building. That’s not this. 

AMY, a teenage girl, and her friends find a human hand and a man’s boot while they are hanging out together. The boot contained a severed foot. Detective Cara Kennedy arrives from Anchorage to help Police Chief Shipley and his cohort, Joe Bokowsky aka J.B. 

Cara starts right in rather abruptly asking questions.  There are some strange people in the town and they all know each other – or think they do.  They all value their privacy and don’t like folks asking too many questions – especially, it seems, police folks.  

Lonnie is a young woman who is somewhat retarded and enjoys walking her moose, Denny, around on a leash. Amy, who found the body parts, is a Chinese immigrant who lives with her mother, runs a Chinese restaurant and delivers Chinese food to the residents.  

  These folks are not really suspects they’re more like witnesses but some of them are more involved than they’d like to be.  There’s a rumor that Mrs Wright used to be a bank robber.  

And then comes the storm.