Starred review from October 1, 2022
DEBUT In Oscar-nominated screenwriter Yamashita's first novel, a teen finds body parts in a cove in Point Mettier, a very small town in Alaska. The police assume the limbs are from a passenger from a cruise ship. Detective Cara Kennedy arrives from Anchorage on a personal search. A year earlier, her husband and son disappeared on a camping trip, and their body parts were only recently discovered. She hopes to make a connection to those murders. Instead, she finds a secretive town where all 205 residents live in one apartment building with services, including a two-man police department. When she finds no answers, she plans to leave town--but the only exit, a two-mile tunnel, is blocked due to an avalanche. She's stuck in a town where everyone is lying, an isolated place where abused women flee for safety. It's not so safe when a head is discovered, a gang storms into town from a nearby reservation, and a woman and her sons disappear. Cara teams up with a police officer on a rescue plan that leads to shoot-outs and violence in the tunnels. VERDICT The claustrophobic atmosphere in this unique one-building town, isolated by tunnels, weather, and secrets, builds a memorable debut crime novel.--Lesa Holstine
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Starred review from October 10, 2022
Unusual topography plays a major role in screenwriter Yamashita’s atmospherically charged debut, a locked-city mystery. Once a secret military base, the tiny city of Point Mettier, Alaska, is reached by land through a narrow, one-way tunnel. Full-time residents live in one self-sufficient high-rise. During eight months of winter, the temperature reaches −35 °F and “eyelashes could actually freeze.” When 17-year-old Amy Lin and friends discover a severed hand and foot in Hidden Cove, where they retreat to smoke pot, Det. Cara Kennedy comes from Anchorage to investigate. That Cara has hidden personal motives for wanting to be on the case raises the tension. Then a blizzard and avalanche block the tunnel, and harrowing secrets and lingering lies surface along with more body parts. The disappearance of a mother and her two sons prompts a search that leads to a spellbinding, unforgettable climax and an unpredictable resolution. Well-defined secondary characters include a roving gang of ruffians on snowmobiles with their own violent agenda. This distinctively original perspective on a “community of stragglers, oddballs, and recluses” heralds the arrival of a major new talent. Agent: Lucy Carson, Friedrich Agency.
December 1, 2022
Oscar-nominated screenwriter Yamashita makes her fiction debut with a celluloid-ready thriller that opens with body parts--a hand and foot that wash up on Point Mettier shores. Inspired by remote Whittier, Alaska, former military outpost Point Mettier has 205 full-time residents who all live in a single building, The Davidson Condos. Seventeen-year-old Amy Lin found the separated appendages. Detective Cara Kennedy arrives from Anchorage to ask a few more questions. Lonnie Mercer's trying not to tell anyone anything about what's buried in her pet moose's stall. When an avalanche traps Cara in Mettier, she's suddenly got time to find the rest of John Doe. Despite plenty of clunky writing ("Ma went from zero to hero in an instant," "literally and figuratively shrouded in fog"), Yamashita knows how to keep her pages turning with plenty of close-up-ready characters, including a scooter-riding little girl haunting the halls, a cuckold with "awkward, Mayberry-like charm" ready for love, and a once-famous Japanese singer who pays the local children to attend her dead daughter's birthday parties. Yamashita's plotting proves addictive; her final line promises more to come.
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Starred review from November 15, 2022
An urban Alaska detective unlocks menacing secrets in a frigid, sinister small town while struggling to recover from a personal tragedy. The discovery of dismembered body parts in rugged, remote Point Mettier brings police detective Cara Kennedy from Anchorage to investigate. The find was made by teenager Amy Lin, who spotted the remains while smoking pot with some friends at a secluded cove, bypassing the Salty Pub, a local watering hole that serves as the hub for town gossip and hell-raising. Point Mettier looms as a forbidding character in this dark thriller; it has only 205 residents, all of whom live in the Davidson Condos, an industrial complex that can only be accessed by an underground tunnel. Yamashita's perspective shifts from Cara to Amy to paranoid Lonnie, who hears voices and wanders the town in fear that she'll be locked up again in the Institute. The compelling stories of these three women, outsiders all, are nicely balanced with the criminal investigation, which proceeds steadily in tantalizing tidbits. Further isolation is triggered by a winter storm that cuts off all access to the town. Cara is emerging from a family tragedy that occasionally undermines her will and fills her with self-doubt. Subliminal misogyny is so deeply baked into the town's culture that all three women at times question their perceptions of reality. Several more or less disreputable residents emerge as suspects as riddles large and small add fuel to the mystery on the way to the final solution. An offbeat, sharply written thriller.
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