BookBrowse Reviews City Under One Roof by Iris Yamashita

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A mystery in a small Alaskan town is driven by a colorful cast of engaging characters.

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When a disembodied arm and leg wash ashore in Point Mettier, Alaska, most residents assume they belong to someone who died by suicide. But Detective Cara Kennedy, who comes to the town from Anchorage to investigate, suspects there's more to this story.

The cast of oddballs and misfits in Iris Yamashita's City Under One Roof rent apartments in a single high-rise complex known as "Dave Co," where everyone knows everyone else's business. These strange folks do not greet Cara warmly as she begins poking around and asking questions about the washed-up body parts. The locals of Point Mettier wish to be left alone, happy to assume the appendages belong to a soul lost to depression at sea. As the mystery unfolds, Yamashita shifts between multiple points of view, covering the perspectives of Cara; Amy, a teenager working with her mother in their local Chinese restaurant; and Lonnie, a troubled woman with a pet moose who has spent time in a mental institution and seems to know a few too many secrets surrounding the mysterious death. Through these unique characters and the novel's suspenseful plot, Yamashita explores multiple themes, including immigration, family bonds and mental illness.

Amy navigates tension with her mother, who is strict and hard-working, always focused on maintaining their restaurant. When Amy, who knows relatively little about her Chinese heritage, wants to do a DNA test for an extra credit project at school, her mother becomes unsettled and frustrated. After uncovering a secret that could threaten their immigration status, Amy finds herself in the position of needing to protect them from being deported as out-of-town detectives are snooping around. It's easy to sympathize with Amy's teenage angst and her struggles to understand her identity, especially with the added complications of feeling out of place as an immigrant, her uneasy relationship with her mother, and the possible legal troubles they both face.

Lonnie, meanwhile, suffers traumatic childhood memories of witnessing her mother's death and the institution she was sent to live in afterward. While she cares deeply for her moose companion, Denny, she isolates herself from the Point Mettier community because she doesn't trust anyone. The voices in her head tell her that everyone talks behind her back. I applaud Yamashita's effort to bring mental illness to light, but representing it clearly and accurately is imperative to breaking stigma, and that is not always done here, as Lonnie's condition seems more associated with a generic idea of mental illness than something realistic. Her symptoms could be connected to schizophrenia, but they are indistinct at times. For example, her fixation on certain words causes her to get lost in word association, but it is unclear whether this is due to her thoughts or auditory hallucinations. However, her experiences invoke compassion, and her story is made evocative and intriguing through her memories and the secrets she keeps related to Chief Sipley, the local chief of police.

As Cara seeks to uncover the truth behind the beached body parts, she is wrestling with grief over the sudden loss of her husband and son on a camping trip, and her quest for answers drives her work. She thinks their deaths might be connected to the case in Point Mettier, but she must overcome her clouded judgment to prevent personal motivations from distracting her. She also must try to not be sidetracked by her growing feelings for local police officer J.B., who is aiding in the investigation.

City Under One Roof is filled from cover to cover with compelling stories from engaging characters. As Yamashita conveys, all the members of this community have complicated backstories, and not everyone likes everyone else. However, they check on each other's well-being, keep each other's secrets, and protect one another from strangers and threats. Yamashita weaves their experiences and perspectives together to drive the mystery, and as it unfolds, the reader cannot help but become attached to this odd community and the sense of familial loyalty between all the inhabitants of Dave Co.

This review was originally published in The BookBrowse Review in January 2023, and has been updated for the January 2024 edition. Click here to go to this issue.