Screenwriter and author Iris Yamashita (City Under One Roof) presents the second installment in a series featuring Detective Cara Kennedy. The previous year, Cara buried the remains of her husband and son, recovered some time after they disappeared on a family camping trip. As Village in the Dark opens, Cara stands by their gravesites, watching the exhumation she's requested in order to further investigate their deaths. She's been placed on long-term disability from the Anchorage Police Department after a failed psych evaluation, so her inquiries will be a bit trickier than usual, even without the personal element. But she's found pictures of her late loved ones on a gangster's cell phone, along with other people who keep turning up dead.
Chapters from Cara's point of view alternate with those of Ellie, hotelier and busybody at Point Mettier, "the city under one roof": all 205 residents stacked in a single high-rise building in the Alaskan backcountry. Ellie "always had the best interests of the townsfolk in mind whether they appreciated it or not." This mystery offers both steadily increasing tension and body count, plus plenty of tragedy--not only death, but abuse, neglect, and societal ills. These are balanced with comic elements and moments of zaniness--as when Ellie leads "one of the stranger posses in the history of posses. An innkeeper, a storekeeper, a Japanese lounge singer, and a cancer-ridden geezer"--making Village in the Dark an alternately moody and wacky novel. --Julia Kastner, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia