Book Review: Village in the Dark | Iris Yamashita

A chilling (in more ways than one!) mystery centering around three strong female characters in the dark, cold winter in Alaska. Iris Yamashita’s Village in the Dark is the second book featuring the lead character Cara Kennedy, and picks up with her pursuing more information about what led to the death of her husband and son over a year earlier.

About the Book | Village in the Dark

Detective Cara Kennedy thought she’d lost her husband and son in an accident, but harrowing evidence has emerged that points to murder–and she will stop at nothing to find the truth in this riveting mystery from the author of City Under One Roof.

On a frigid February day, Anchorage Detective Cara Kennedy stands by the graves of her husband and son, watching as their caskets are raised from the earth. It feels sacrilegious, but she has no choice. Aaron and Dylan disappeared on a hike a year ago, their bones eventually found and buried. But shocking clues have emerged that foul play was involved, potentially connecting them to a string of other deaths and disappearances. 
 
Somehow tied to the mystery is Mia Upash, who grew up in an isolated village called Unity, a community of women and children in hiding from abusive men. Mia never imagined the trouble she would find herself in when she left home to live in Man’s World. Although she remains haunted by the tragedy of what happened to the man and the boy in the woods, she has her own reasons for keeping quiet.
 
Aided by police officer Joe Barkowski and other residents of Point Mettier, Cara’s investigation will lead them on a dangerous path that puts their lives and the lives of everyone around them in mortal jeopardy. (Synopsis from Goodreads)

Review | Village in the Dark

Village in the Dark is the sequel to Yamashita’s City Under One Roof. The book picks up where the previous book left off, and offers a partial conclusion to where the first book left off. Though this is a sequel, Yamashita does a fantastic job of laying out where Cara Kennedy is at the start of the book and where she has been. You don’t need to read both to read this one.

The book opens with police detective Cara Kennedy at a gravesite in Anchorage, Alaska. But rather than burying the bodies of her husband and son, she’s having their remains exhumed. Over the past year and four months, Cara has lost her husband and son and been paced on long-term disability from her job after failing a psych eval. Though they seemingly died in an accident in the Alaskan wilderness, Cara has become obsessed with linking them to another case in Point Mettier, Alaska and proving it was foul play.

Meanwhile the owner of the Cozy Condo Inn inside the Davidson Condos in Point Mettier, Ellie Wright, is experiencing her own troubles. The town of Point Mettier has just over 200 residents, all of whom reside in the same condo building. Ellies’s son Timmy has died of an alleged drug overdose in Anchorage. When Cara finds pictures of her husband, son, Timmy, and other missing people on a phone belonging to a gang member, she’s convinced the deaths are tied together. Ellie and Cara may not always have gotten along, but their shared grief and search for answers seems to heal those past wounds.

The third storyline centers around Mia, who is a young indigenous woman working under the name Carol at the Lonely Diner in Willow, Alaska. Mia grew up on a women’s collective called Unity where she lost her mother. Mia has struggled to assimilate to life outside of the women’s refuge. She also seems to know what happened to Cara’s husband and son, but is keeping quiet about what she saw.

 The first book took place fully in Point Mettier, which is based on the real life town of Whittier which is nicknamed “the town under one roof” because all of the town residents live in one building. I’m fascinated by this setting, so I was initially disappointed that this book only had portions set in Point Mettier. The claustrophobic feeling of the first book is also less present, leaving the story much more open. This made sense stylistically because the case has become much bigger than the case in the first book.

Yamashita does an excellent job building tension throughout the book. Cara Kennedy is in a bad place at the start of the book, and it seems at first like she may be continuing to spiral in the obsession that has plagued her since the deaths of her husband and son. Though Cara seems to be onto a real case, she still proves that her clarity of thought has been clouded by her trauma and mental health struggles. That doesn’t mean she won’t be able to make progress, but she puts herself and other into situations her police training would have avoided.

The plotting of the story was inconsistent, though that could potentially be intentional because the entire premise of the mystery and setting should make us feel off kilter as we try to figure out what is really going on. By the end of the book, Cara’s main storyline that dominated the first two books seems to be resolved, which leaves the question of where Yamashita may take a possible third book. Perhaps this is the conclusion of this story and a future book may revisit Point Mettier in a different way.

Thank you to Berkley for my copy. Opinions are my own.

About the Author | Iris Yamashita

Iris is the Academy Award-nominated screenwriter for the script “Letters From Iwo Jima” directed by Clint Eastwood. The film was nominated for 4 Oscars including “Best Picture” and “Best Original Screenplay.”

City Under One Roof is her debut mystery novel and the first in the Cara Kennedy series, set in a tiny Alaskan town where all the residents lives in a single high-rise building. The book was Crime Fiction Lover’s Editor’s Choice for Best Debut Crime Novel of the year and was named one of the Best Thrillers of the year by Washington Post as well as one of the Best Crime Fiction of the year by Library Journal and one of the Best Fiction Books of the year by Reader’s Digest.

Village in the Dark is her follow up novel to City Under One Roof.