City Under One Roof

 This is a book that made a lot of best-of lists last year, but unfortunately, the interesting premise did not pay off in good execution. The setting of the story is the fictional Alaskan town of Point Mettier, based on the actual town of Whittier. The reason that this city has the name of ‘city under one roof' is that all the 250-odd residents quite literally live in one massive, interconnected apartment block. The city itself is only accessible via a tunnel, and in case of storms, access is cut off. So this is an excellent setting for a locked-room mystery, either traditional, or with a twist. 

The book opens with a local teenager, Amy, discovering a dismembered hand and foot on the shore of a local lake (something like the real Salish foot mysteries). Quickly, a local mentally-ill woman, Lonnie, who keeps a pet moose and was formerly institutionalised, comes under suspicion. A detective from Anchorage, Cara, who is visiting to help with the investigation, has her own secrets and reasons for visiting the town. The story is told from each of their POVs, alternating back and forth. The author is a former Hollywood screenwriter: as might be expected, the dialogue is decent, but the rest of the story is very badly narrated, almost as though they were, in fact, relying on visuals to be added later. 

The other thing I didn't care for, in this novel, was the almost-caricatured descriptions of local native populations, who are shown as crime-ridden and violent, and also, immune to law enforcement because of some unexplained ‘native protection'. Add to that some unnecessary howlers (characters described as being in two places at the same time - editors should have caught that; mentions of elk tracks (another reviewer pointed out there aren't elk on mainland Alaska) and it felt, overall, badly written. Finally, all the cops in this book behave badly, but are presented as heroes. There's the ‘good old boy' local sheriff, his naive but enthusiastic trainee, and the jaded visiting outsider, all of whom repeatedly break their own rules but are never held accountable or considered even slightly critically and are instead presented as heroes. In 2024, this just comes across as particularly deluded. 

In sum, this is a made-for-Netflix bait book. Not for me.