Waiting on Wednesday – City Under One Roof by Iris Yamashita

Welcome to my weekly segment, Waiting on Wednesday, where I look at upcoming books that I am planning to order and review in the next few months and which I think I will really enjoy. I run this segment in conjunction with the Can’t-Wait Wednesday meme that is currently running at Wishful Endings. Stay tuned to see reviews of these books when I get a copy of them. In this week’s Waiting on Wednesday, I look at a fantastic upcoming debut with City Under One Roof by Iris Yamashita.

City Under One Roof Cover

Amazon Book Depository

It has been an exceptional year for debuts in 2022, with some amazing and impressive first novels coming out, especially in the crime fiction genre. I always love checking out someone’s first book, especially as it provides some great insights into their writing style, and it is always interesting to see what the future holds for them. Well, it looks like 2023 is also going to be an excellent year for debut novels, and there is already one great crime fiction debut coming out early next year that has caught my eye.

That book is City Under One Roof by new author Iris Yamashita. Yamashita, who people may already know as the Academy Award nominated author of the intriguing film Letters From Iwo Jima, is breaking into the crime fiction scene in a big way next year, and I love the sound of her first book. City Under One Roof, which is set for release here in Australia in February 2023, has a great story that sees a determined and haunted detective attempt to solve a murder in a mysterious remote town in Alaska. However, her investigation becomes even more complex when the town is cut-off by a blizzard, gang members arrive, and the entire town become suspects in the murder.

I love the sound of this upcoming book, and I think that it has a lot of potential to be an impressive crime fiction release. Yamashita has definitely gone out of her way to create an elaborate sounding mystery storyline, and I am very intrigued to see how everything turns out. I also love the idea of an isolated and mysterious setting, and I can’t wait to see how it plays into the main narrative. Overall, City Under One Roof sounds like a particularly awesome mystery book to start next year off with and I am extremely confident that this is going to be one of the top debuts of 2023.

Plot Synopsis:

A stranded detective tries to solve a murder in a tiny Alaskan town where everyone lives in a single high-rise building, in this gripping debut by an Academy Award–nominated screenwriter.

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. A detective from Anchorage, she has her own motives for investigating the possible murder in this isolated place, which can be accessed only by a tunnel.

After a blizzard causes the tunnel to close indefinitely, Cara is stuck among the odd and suspicious residents of the town—all 205 of whom live in the same high-rise building and are 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.

Haunted by her past, Cara soon discovers that everyone in this town has something to hide. Will she be able to unravel their secrets before she unravels?”