City Under One Roof
Amy is a teenager whose mother runs Star Asian Food, the Chinese restaurant in a remote Alaskan town where all the inhabitants live in a single high-rise building. It’s winter, a time when tourists are absent and the town is only accessible by a single-lane tunnel through the mountain. While exploring the town’s beach, Amy stumbles across a half-buried hand and a boot with a severed foot in it.
An initial police investigation concludes that this is just another of the floating-feet-in-shoes that have been turning up on beaches all up and down the coast, usually attributed to accidental drownings or suicides. But Cara Kennedy, a police detective from Anchorage, comes to town to follow up. She questions the presence of the hand: that’s unlike those other cases. Then she discovers a boot print on shore, identical to the tread of the boot. She concludes that the boot’s owner was alive on shore here before being killed.
Cara thought she’d be able to complete her investigation in a few hours, returning to Anchorage before nightfall. But she’s trapped in town by a fierce snowstorm and avalanche that close the tunnel for days.
Lonnie is a damaged young woman who hears voices and whose main goal is not to be sent back to The Institute, where she was sent as a traumatized child after her abusive stepfather murdered her mother. Now she spends her days looking after Denny, the moose she rescued as a baby when hunters killed his mother and who is now her main companion.
The story is told through these three very different perspectives: those of Cara, Amy and Lonnie. We learn that pretty well everyone in town — including the investigators — has secrets that they don’t want revealed. Nearly everyone is from somewhere else, often as a fugitive from situations they wanted to evade.
Eventually the events leading to the murder and the dismemberment are uncovered, but only after an unfolding series of complications emerging from the residents’ relationships and backstories.
With captivating characters and a quite unusual setting, the book was named one of the best crime novels of the year by Library Journal, and was deemed the Best Debut Novel of 2023 by Crime Fiction Lover.
Iris Yamashita was born in Missouri in 1965. She was mainly raised in Hawaii but spent five years on Guam as a teenager, and has since lived in California and Japan. She studied engineering at UC Berkley and UC San Diego. She also studied virtual reality at the University of Tokyo, while pursuing fiction writing as a hobby.
Her first job after graduation was at an engineering software company, but she continued to write fiction in her spare time. Her breakthrough came when she won a screenwriting competition and acquired an agent, leading to a career as a screenwriter in Hollywood. She is best known for writing the script for Letters From Iwo Jima directed by Clint Eastwood, which received a Golden Globe award for “Best Foreign Language Film” in 2006 and was nominated for four Oscars including “Best Picture” and “Best Original Screenplay.”
Still wanting to write prose fiction, Iris didn’t initially set out to write a mystery novel, but a visit to the town of Whittier in Alaska (a real-life town where most of the inhabitants live in one apartment building) was the inspiration for City Under One Roof. A sequel, Village in the Dark, is set for release in February 2024, again featuring detective Cara Kennedy.
Iris lives in California with her husband, John Lewis Chan.
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