Book Review: City Under One Roof

Synopsis:

When a local teenager discovers a severed hand and foot washed up on the shore of the small town of Point Mettier, Alaska, Cara Kennedy is on the case. She’s a detective with the Anchorage police force and haunted by her past. So she has her own motives for investigating a possible murder in the isolated little city that can only be accessed by a tunnel.

After a blizzard causes the tunnel to close indefinitely, Cara is stranded among the odd and suspicious residents of the town. All 205 of them live in the same high-rise building and they’re as icy as the weather. Cara teams up with Point Mettier police officer Joe Barkowski, but before long the investigation is upended by fearsome gang members from a nearby native village.

Cara soon discovers that everyone in town has something to hide. Will she be able to unravel their secrets before she unravels?

City Under One Roof is a gripping debut mystery from Iris Yamashita, an Academy Award-nominated screenwriter turned novelist.

Review:

Debut author Iris Yamashita was Born in Missouri, but grew up in Hawaii. She has also lived in Guam, Japan, and California where she studied engineering at the University of California, San Diego and Berkeley. She studied virtual reality for a year at the University of Tokyo studying virtual reality. She has always dreamed of writing books, but found herself unable to complete any manuscripts. So she turned to screenwriting, and was discovered by an agent at the Creative Artists Agency after entering a writing competition. She penned the script for Letters From Iwo Jima, a Clint Eastwood film which was selected as the Best Picture of 2006 by the National Board of Review and Los Angeles Film Critics Association, and the recipient of a Golden Globe award for Best Foreign Language Film. It was also in the running for Best Picture at the Academy Awards that year, and Yamashita was nominated for having written the Best Original Screenplay. Yamashita is still writing for films and streaming media, and wrote a musical for a Japanese theme park with composer Jeanine Tesori. Additionally, she has taught screenwriting at the University of California, Los Angeles and the American Film Institute. Eventually, Yamashita returned to writing her first novel, City Under One Roof, which she characterizes as a “locked city mystery.”

The story was inspired by a documentary she viewed more than twenty years ago about the city of Whittier, Alaska. It was “intriguing” and she found the idea that all of the residents lived in a single building “fascinating.” She was certain that “there should be a story” that plays out in such “a cool setting.” She originally conceptualized the murder mystery for a streaming platform and wrote a pilot episode, but ultimately adapted it into City Under One Roof in which “the setting is a character itself.”

Whittier, Alaska is about sixty miles southeast of Anchorage, at the head of Passage Canal. It is situated between the spectacular mountains and an ice-free port, surrounded by three glaciers. It serves as the gateway to the Prince William Sound wilderness. Snowfall in Whittier averages twenty-two feet per year, but every summer tourists visit the city, many arriving aboard cruise ships. The city is also accessible via the Anton Anderson Memorial Tunnel through Maynard Mountain. At two-and-a-half miles long, it is the longest highway tunnel in North America, built to withstand temperatures up to -40 degrees Fahrenheit temperatures and winds of one hundred fifty miles per hour. In 2000, the one-lane tunnel was made passable by cars in addition to trains, each navigating the tunnel in both directions. The tunnel is aired out between trips with jet turbine ventilation. The single lane of vehicle traffic travels directly over the slightly sunken railroad track, and there are safe-houses within the tunnel — small buildings that can be used in the event of a severe earthquake, vehicle fire, or other emergency.

Whittier was once known as Camp Sullivan. During World War II, the U.S. Army built the port and railroad to transport soldiers there. Following the war, two high-rise buildings were erected and the Army continued operating the port until 1960. In 1964, the 9.2 magnitude “Good Friday Earthquake,” still the largest on record in the U.S., caused over ten million dollars in damage, triggered tsunamis, and claimed forty-three lives. It also rendered one of the city’s two large buildings uninhabitable. Incorporated in 1969, the city still boasts a three-person year-round police force and volunteer fire and rescue squad. The city’s two hundred and seventy-two or so citizens all reside in a fourteen-story condominimum known as Beghic Towers Incorporated which also houses the hospital, school, and city government offices.

Yamashita set City Under One Roof in fictional Point Mettier, Alaska, modeled after Whittier but with some distinct differences, including additional pedestrian tunnels such as the one used by the town’s children to get to their schoolroom. In the story, the shell of one building, destroyed by the 1964 earthquake, remains standing and the diverse group of two hundred and five residents all live in the Davidson Condos, known as the Dave-Co where the post office, a church, an infirmary, and a general store that sells “touristy tchotchkes” are situated. There is also an inn within the structure. Winter lasts for about eight months with temperatures as low as minus thirty-five degrees, and Alaska is thrust into darkness for nearly the entire day for several months of the year. Life in a place like Point Mettier does not appeal to everyone, and the permanent, long-time residents are “there for a reason,” Yamashita says. Some love the scenic setting, the isolation, or living within such a closeknit community. But most “have secrets and might be running away from something or someone. The characters that I highlight have a reason for being in the locked city, including the protagonist,” Yamashita relates.

In fact, when Yamashita visited Whittier while researching the book, she discovered that when the tunnel only accommodated train travel, one of the female residents was protected by the train conductor who prevented her abusive ex-husband from boarding and traveling to Whittier. A disproportionately high number of women in Alaska have endured domestic violence, in part because of the scant police enforcement of laws and restraining orders designed to protect them in remote regions. She explores the theme of fictional Point Mettier functioning as a safe haven for victims by incorporating that history into the story. Even now that vehicle traffic flows into Point Mettier, the toll booth operator tells Cara that he maintains a list of “no-gooders” to watch out for, but acknowledges that other than checking identification and attempting to dissuade them with stories about the tunnel shutting down there is little he can do to prevent them from entering the city.

Yamashita relates the story from three perspectives. “As you travel through the tunnel,” she relates, “you’re falling down a rabbit hole and end up in a strange and crazy wonderland full of quirky characters.” Cara Kennedy is an “otter,” which is what the townspeople call outsiders. She is a detective with the Anchorage police who arrives in Point Mettier because she is investigating what might be a murder case. Yamashita likens her to Alice in Wonderland, chasing clues as to why body parts have been washing up on the area’s shores. As the book opens, in fact, Amy Lin, a local teenager, has stumbled upon a hand and foot. More than a year ago, Cara and her husband, Aaron, decided to take a much-needed vacation with their young son, Dylan. They rented a cabin in Talkeetna near Denali National Park and on the third day, Aaron took Dylan, along with his camera gear, on a morning hike to see snowshoe hares. They never returned. Cara wants to investigate whether their disappearance could be linked in any way to the body parts. When an avalanche closes the tunnel, she is forced to remain in Point Mettier. It’s ironice given that she suffers from claustrophobia. She teams up with Chief Sipley and the town’s only police officer, Joe Barkowski, but does not reveal significant details about what prompted her to travel to Point Mettier. Cara is a highly skilled police professional who has sustained a horrible tragedy. She is determined to get answers, and willing to take whatever risks are required in order to do so. She is also likable and empathetic, particularly as Yamashita gradually reveals more details about the events that compelled her to visit Point Mettier.

Seventeen-year-old Amy Lin has lived in Point Mettier for fourteen years with her mother, who operates a business serving “barely passable” Chinese food that Amy Lin is tasked with delivering. She has recently learned that the details about her family’s history and origins that she always accepted as true were actually manufactured by her mother. That knowledge has stirred up perplexing feelings and emotions for her, even though the revelations have given her a new understanding of her mother and her motivations. Day-to-day life in Point Mettier is challenging for Amy Lin due to a lack of activities, even though there are occasional school field trips. She is certain that were it not for Internet access connecting the little town to the rest of the world, she would not survive. There is nothing perplexing, however, about her feelings for her boyfriend, Even Spence Blackmon, who moved to Point Mettier about seven years ago with his younger brother, Troy, and their mother, Debra, who is one of the schoolteachers. Amy and Spence sneak off, along with the other local kids, to the remains of the next-door Walcott Building which used to house a bowling alley, auditorium, movie theater, and indoor pool. When Even and his family go missing, Amy is determined to find them. She is intuitive, observant, and resilient — the white rabbit to Cara’s Alice, according to Yamashita.

Lonnie Mercer is Yamashita’s Mad Hatter. She wears a different colored beret every day, speaks in what Yamashita describes as “word salad” (strings of free-flowing, internal word associations) and has an undisclosed mental disability. She lives in fear of being sent back to the Institute where she was forced to live for a time after her mother was killed by an abusive boyfriend. She orders the same thing from Amy Lin’s mother every day — fried rice — and is devoted to her pet moose, Denny. Chief Sipley looks after Lonnie and instructs her not to speak to Cara, ask her any questions or answer any questions Cara might pose, reminding her, “You don’t want to end up back at the Institute, do you?”

Yamashita surrounds her three main characters with an eclectic group of supporting players, including the innkeeper, the manager of the general store, a gang of criminals whose headquarters are located in a nearby village, and a lonely lounge singer who was once a successful recording artist in Japan. Point Mettier is, of course, a central character in the tale, as well — brooding, claustrophobic, and holding the secrets of its inhabitants. Yamashita’s prowess as a screenwriter translates well to a lushly descriptive narrative that brings to life not just her compelling characters, but also the fascinating little town of Point Mettier and the surrounding area. She convincingly details how a place as naturally beautiful as the region can also be eerily menacing and frightening. She effectively melds her characters’ emotional struggles with the procedural aspects of Cara’s investigation, keeping the action moving forward at a fast pace and accelerating the tension as Cara and Officer Barkowski grow closer to each other and to identifying the individual whose partial remains were discovered by Amy Lin.

In City Under One Roof, some of the mysteries explored are wrapped up in a cohesive, satisfying manner. However, as the story proceeds, Yamashita introduces intriguing additional details pertaining to others and refrains from providing a tidy ending to those plots. Indeed, City Under One Roof is just the first entertaining installment in what promises to be a riveting and atmospheric series featuring Yamashita’s colorful and eccentric cast of characters. Village in the Dark also featurs Point Mettier.

Excerpt from City Under One Roof

Chapter One

Amy

“And when did you find the body” — Officer Neworth paused for a moment before adding — “parts? When did you find the body parts?”

It was a hand and a foot, to be exact. Or at least Amy thought there was a foot. She hadn’t bothered to look inside the boot, but since Officer Neworth said “parts” instead of “part,” she assumed there must have been a foot-a bloated, sawed-off, purple-blotched piece of flesh that would have made her dry heave at the sight.

“Yesterday, around eleven a.m.,” she said. She was pretty sure she had mentioned this detail at least six times that very day. She’d thought getting pulled out of algebra class would be fun, but now she was having second thoughts.

The boot, she remembered, looked fairly new. It was covered with mud and grime, but the treads weren’t that worn and the laces hadn’t frayed yet. She hadn’t told any of this to Officer Neworth, though. Up until then, she’d tried to say as little as possible, sticking to answers like “Yes,” “No,” and “I don’t know.”

Amy Lin stared at Officer Neworth and his receded-to-an-island hairline and decided that he was not someone who could be trusted. For one thing, he was wearing a gold watch. Any man who wears a gold watch is a little shady. Second, anyone who asks you the same question over and over expecting a different answer does not trust you, and therefore you should not trust them. And last of all, Neworth was from Anchorage, and Point Mettier people tended to keep their mouths shut around any of the “otters.” “Otters” is what the kids called people outside Point Mettier because it kind of sounded like the word “others.”

“So, tell me again, who were you with?” he asked.

Amy sighed internally and gave him a glare. Did she look like a caged parrot that would keep repeating the same thing over and over again?

Officer Neworth shifted in his seat and adjusted his leather duty belt, which sagged with the weight of lethal equipment-a baton, cuffs, a magazine pouch, a flashlight, a Taser, pepper spray, and of course, a Glock pistol. But despite all his protective equipment, Neworth looked uncomfortable under the glare of a seventeen-year-old teenager who was barely five foot two. He finally turned his eyes away and looked down at his notepad. “Celine Hoffler and Marco Salonga?”

“Yes,” Amy finally answered as if his question was somehow offensive.

“And what were you doing at the cove?”

“Just getting out.” Amy wasn’t about to tell him the real reason they went to the cove, which was to smoke pot. Marijuana was legal in Alaska, but they were still minors.

———-

It was a Sunday, and there was a break in the rain, so they had all bundled up in their neoprenes, parkas, and ski caps and decided to paddle their kayaks out to Hidden Cove. On sunny days in summer, Sanders Glacier across the inlet would look brilliant against the sky, with blue and white ice caps like a giant slushy spilled onto a mountain valley. Tourists would come in flocks during the high season to Point Mettier. Even though, Amy knew, the real pronunciation of “Mettier” was probably the French way, rhyming with “get away,” everyone butchered the name and said it in a way that sounded like “dirtier.” The otters always wanted to see the glaciers in the sound and paid top dollar for cruise ships and yachts to take them up close. Amy wasn’t sure why. She’d been up to a few of the glaciers, including Sanders, and had come to the conclusion that they were prettier from afar. On that Sunday in October, though, there had been dense clouds hanging low over the cove and Sanders just looked like a looming gray monster behind the mist.

Since tourist season was over and the thrum of motorboats and seagoing vessels was gone, it was pretty quiet on the water. Just the dwop dwop sound of their paddles dipping in and out, and the kittiwakes screeching overhead. Once they got to the beach, they loitered around, passed a joint, not really talking or doing anything specific. Celine hopped on a fallen log and balanced across the length of it like a high-wire act. Her sandy blond hair floated behind her in the wind, the way you see in the movies. Amy had always been envious of Celine’s hair, because hers was just a dull black. She wanted to dye it platinum blue, except that her mother would probably kill her-literally. Marco was skipping rocks, or maybe he was throwing them at birds; she couldn’t remember exactly.

Amy started combing the beach for mementos to add to her collection: fish skeletons and coins, jewelry, and other odds and ends left behind by careless tourists. It was about that time that she noticed something on the south side of the cove-just a little shimmer, like a Morse code of light-and headed over toward it to investigate.

It was sunshine reflecting off the rubber toe of a hiking boot. She didn’t realize then that it was anything more than a boot. Kind of a shame, she thought, that someone had lost a perfectly good boot. But when she bent down on the gravelly shore to take a closer look, something else caught her eye. Something she had almost stepped on.

It was a severed hand, half-buried in the sand. Or at least it looked like a hand, but it was green and almost translucent, the way glow-in-the-dark stickers look when the light is on. She could see the lines of the joints on the fingers, but the entire hand was swollen and greasy-looking. It felt as if a whole minute went by while she just stood there, staring. In reality, it was probably more like ten seconds before she finally blinked and found her voice.

“Guys,” was all she could muster. The others immediately stopped what they were doing and came to see what she was pointing at. Celine was the one who actually screamed-a high-pitched, earsplitting almost wail of a cry that echoed across the valley and sent shivers down Amy’s spine.

———-

“And what did you do after you found the parts?” Officer Neworth interrupted her thoughts and continued with his interrogation. At least it felt like an interrogation to Amy, even though it was just a witness account.

Amy wanted to reply, “What do you think we did? Hang them up for Halloween decorations?” But instead she said, “We went back to the Dave-Co and told Officer Barkowski.”

“The Dave-Co?”

Amy sighed. “The building we’re sitting in now. The Davidson Condos.” The condos were supposed to have been named after some general who served in World War II, but she had heard a rumor that the buildings were actually named after Randolph Davidson, a famous Alaskan con man who set up a fake telegraph office through which he took money for sending blips and beeps that never went anywhere except into a wall.

Neworth laughed at the name. “Is that what you call it? So, how long have you lived here . . . in the Dave-Co?”

Amy knew this question had nothing to do with the body parts. “Fourteen years,” she replied.

“Holy cow,” he said with a kind of pity in his voice.

People from Anchorage tended to look at Point Mettier kids as charity cases. “It’s always shittier in Point Mettier,” they would say. It wasn’t just the minus thirty-five degrees and eight months of practical winter. The thing that really made otters believe residents of Point Mettier were batshit crazy was the fact that they all lived in one building . . . in the Dave-Co.

There were 205 full-time residents in Point Mettier. The Dave-Co had a post office, a church, an infirmary, and a general store that also acted as a gift shop, selling the same touristy tchotchkes since the nineties-Sanders Glacier mugs and cork coasters with pictures of moose, bears, or kittiwakes. The school was just an underground tunnel away.

Back when the city was a military outpost, the Walcott Building next door had a bowling alley, an auditorium, a movie theater, and even an indoor pool, but that building was practically destroyed in the big earthquake of 1964, and now it was just an abandoned skeleton of itself. The Dave-Co, on the other hand, didn’t have any of those cool amenities, not even a barbershop or salon where people could get a decent haircut.

For a seventeen-year-old, it was boring as hell. It was more of a prison than a home, really. If it weren’t for the Internet, Amy thought, she would have killed herself over the lack of stimuli.

Most families who came to live in Point Mettier left after a year or two. Nobody was actually from there and nobody liked to stick it out for too long. Celine had come about two years ago from Minnesota. Marco Salonga’s family had come from the Philippines. Amy and her mother had probably come from the farthest end of the earth, but they belonged to the longtimers club because Amy had been only three when they arrived. She didn’t know any other kids who had lived in Point Mettier that long. Even Spence Blackmon and his younger brother, Troy, didn’t arrive with their mom until much later, when Spence was ten and Troy must have been six.

People had all sorts of reasons for moving to the city. Some said they fell in love with the scenery or that they liked the isolation or that they liked living in a close community. Amy didn’t believe any of their stories, though. She knew the only real reason people moved out there was because they were running from somebody or something. Why else would you live in a backwater hole of a place where everyone lived in one building and your eyelashes could actually freeze? In fact, Amy had only just found out the real reason why Ma had moved the two of them out there to run a restaurant serving stuff even she knew was barely passable as Chinese food. Again, though, she wasn’t about to spill any of this info to Officer Neworth.

———-

There were just two police officers in Point Mettier: Chief Sipley and Officer Barkowski. Amy had watched enough television to know that the police station she was sitting in now was just a tiny locker room compared with what other cities had. There were the main reception area with tiny squeezed-in desks, the “interrogation room” closet they were sitting in, and a one-cell jail. Whenever there was a suspected “major crime,” like when a tourist tried to kill her husband by stabbing him repeatedly with a dinner knife at one of the restaurants on the pier one summer, Anchorage police were called in, which was why Officer Neworth was there, questioning her about the body parts.

There was a knock at the door and Officer Barkowski poked his head in. “You almost done, Officer Neworth? Or have you just discovered that Amy Lin is a maniacal serial killer?” He gave Amy a friendly wink, and she smiled, despite herself. Officer Barkowski had started working in Point Mettier a year ago. He was always talking to the kids, pretending like he was one of them, making friendly conversation. Amy knew that it was an act, but at least he spoke to them like adults instead of uneducated third-world charity cases. Overall, Amy thought he was one of the good guys, but that didn’t mean she was going to let him in on any secrets. Chief Sipley, on the other hand, had been in Point Mettier longer than anybody. She wasn’t sure exactly what his story was. He looked kind of like a bald and drunken Santa Claus on the outside, but even though he appeared jolly, Amy knew that on the inside, he was the kind of guy who was much smarter than he let on and was always calculating something.

“Chief Sipley just radioed from the cove and says everything’s been bagged and cleared out there,” Barkowski reported.

Officer Neworth closed his notepad as if he had just been idling away his time, waiting for this cue. “I think we’re done here.”

Barkowski eyed the pad like he was just itching to take a look. “We hear there’s been a lot of these cases popping up on the coast. Is that true?”

“Yeah, we’ve heard there’ve been a few in Canada and Washington as well,” Neworth admitted. “This is the third set in Alaska in a year.”

“Any leads?”

“No.” Officer Neworth stood up from his chair. “There’s speculation that they might have been suicide jumpers, or people who accidentally fell off ships.”

“Jesus, that’s sad.”

Officer Neworth nodded. “The plastic in the boots makes them float up and carries them to shore. We don’t get too many hands, though, so it was a bit unusual.” He chewed on that for a moment. “Well, we don’t have all the answers, and I doubt we ever will. But since we can’t identify the bodies or prove any foul play, we can’t exactly investigate them as crimes.”

Officer Barkowski peeked over at Amy. “School’s still in session, if you’re done questioning Ms. Lin.”

“Oh, right.” Officer Neworth suddenly remembered the third person in the room. “You can go now, Amy. Thanks for your cooperation.”

Amy got up slowly and a sense of relief washed over her. She exited the office into the maize-colored concrete hallway and felt like she had just cheated a lie detector test. Well, perhaps she hadn’t really lied. She had just omitted a few facts about who was there. In the end, did it really matter if there were three or four witnesses, especially now that she knew it probably wasn’t even a murder, just some depressed tourist who maybe jumped off a cruise ship?

Chapter Two

Cara

The windshield wipers of the Chevy Suburban flapped in double time, trying to cut through the vaporous shroud of fog that had cloaked Sanders Glacier Road. The radio repeated its announcement that “a severe early-winter weather system” was headed toward Point Mettier, but Cara planned to be in and out before it hit, just long enough to see if there was a case to reopen.

It wasn’t the dismembered foot that caught her attention. She could buy the running theory of suicide victims, and buoyant shoes causing feet to detach from their decaying bodies. But that didn’t explain how a hand washed up next to it, and that was why she was compelled like a moth to a flame on a sojourn to the sequestered town.

The not-unpleasant drive took her along a scenic highway that rimmed Cook Inlet-a finger path of water off the Gulf of Alaska pointing toward the majestic Kenai Mountains. For a moment, she even felt a sense of freedom on the road, with glimpses of civilization-devoid vistas that lulled her out of heavy thoughts. But then she remembered the task at hand and the possibility of a foul murder, and she sobered back up.