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.
Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Iris Yamashita’s Village in the Dark, which releases on February 13th 2024.
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.
CARA
The frigid wind whipped up eager snow eddies off the knolls of the cemetery grounds in South Anchorage. Cara Kennedy tightened her knitted scarf around her neck and wedged her hands in the pockets of her parka in an attempt to keep warm. In summer, the parklike grounds offered a peaceful vista of green, rolling hills under the majestic, white‑capped Chugach Mountains. Though the mountains were seven miles east, they were as much a part of the Anchorage skyline as the twenty‑two‑storied Conoco‑Phillips Building on G Street or the twenty‑one‑floored Hilton Anchorage on Third. Even now in winter, despite having viewed the mountain vista a million times over, Cara still had to marvel at the unobstructed view of the giant, snow‑coned peaks under glacier‑blue skies. It’s why she’d chosen this plot in the Angelus Cemetery for her husband, Aaron, and their son, Dylan.
Yet here she was watching their coffins being unceremoniously craned out of the ground from what were meant to be their final resting places.
Each click of the metal chains hoisting the caskets reverberated through Cara’s bones. Aaron’s walnut‑stained, adult‑sized box was raised first, casting a long shadow that blotted the patch of ground in front of her. The reality of what she was doing finally hit her. She felt suddenly queasy, and a wave of anxiety welled up within her. This felt sacrilegious. Was she making a horrible mistake by disturbing the dead?
Over the course of a year and four months, Cara had lost her family and then been placed on long‑term disability after failing a psych eval. It seemed like a lifetime ago since she’d been working as a detective for the Anchorage Police Department and Aaron was a manager at the research division of a pharmatech company on the edge of town, while Dylan had sprouted into a precocious six‑year‑old with an infectious smile.
Admittedly, it wasn’t always a bed of roses. Cracks had begun to form in the looking glass of their picture‑perfect lives. There was the stress of their jobs, the burdens of taking care of a child, and not least of all, the faithless thoughts that haunted Cara when Aaron slinked into bed in the wee hours after a long day at work. She had even secretly followed him once after a late‑night call that he said was a work emergency, but it turned out he actually did go to his office. A getaway to the Talkeetna wilderness two hours north of Anchorage was the self‑prescribed medication to fix their relationship. It was on the third morning of their trip that Aaron and Dylan had bundled up in their parkas, gloves, and hats, and headed out to look for snow‑shoe hares while Cara slept in. They never returned.
There had been searches, of course—helicopters, dogs, and volunteers. But neither her husband nor son could be found . . . until nine months later when lightning started a multi‑acre forest blaze and firefighters discovered a skull, a leg bone, a rib cage—everything in pieces at the bottom of a ravine. A man and a boy. Cara asked for a verifying DNA report to be sure. The scattered locations of their remains were explained as the work of wild animals—a suggestion that only added to Cara’s pain and horror.
Aaron and Dylan had probably gone off trail and gotten lost, Cara was told. Or maybe Aaron had injured himself on the walk and couldn’t make it back, while Dylan had stayed with him. There was only conjecture without any definitive evidence. In Alaska, where two thousand people a year disappear in the beautiful but vast and foreboding wilderness, few of the missing make the news.
Cara fell into a rabbit hole of unanswered questions and a well of guilt. If she had gone with them, could she have prevented them from getting lost, or helped Aaron if he was injured? Could she have found them sooner when there was still a chance to save them? Should she have forbidden Aaron to take Dylan into the cell‑signal‑ devoid wilderness? Aaron’s blue, dust‑covered SUV, still splattered with the deaths of hundreds of insects, was found abandoned on a seldom‑used gravel road with Aaron’s expensive SLR camera gear and his driver’s license still in the car. Why would Aaron have left his camera and driver’s license behind? This last question made her begin to doubt whether the whole thing was an accident at all. Could there have been foul play involved?
At the station, she became obsessed with cases involving body parts and missing persons, including a slew of extremities washing up on the shores of the Pacific Northwest and Canada, and a couple that washed up near Anchorage. The mundane explanations revolved around the buoyancy of modern‑day sneakers detaching from decomposed corpses of suicide and drowning victims, not the work of a maniacal serial killer. Still, Cara looked for possible connections to what might have happened to her family and began poking her nose into investigations that were not assigned to her. Colleagues began to avoid her. Cara felt herself breaking apart into irreparable pieces like the remains of her loved ones. Her developing anxiety manifested in claustrophobia and insomnia, and she was put on meds. Even now, she continued to be haunted by disturbing nightmares. After a mandated visit to the psychologist, she was deemed unstable and placed on disability.
Now, watching Dylan’s half‑sized coffin being lifted in staccato hoists, Cara had to wonder if she was just heading down another path to Crazy Town. But she had reason, she told herself. It had taken two months to process, but Cara was finally able to get a court order to exhume the bodies. No autopsies had been conducted, since there had been no suspected foul play, but now she wanted a full examination. She knew it would be hard to determine a cause of death from what was left of them, but she also knew that they could still discover evidence of blunt force trauma or bullet holes, or make the distinction between animal teeth marks and cuts by sharp metallic objects.
What had led her to commit this drastic act of exhuming the bodies of her own husband and son? Another case of dismemberment that Cara had investigated on no one’s authority but her own. The case had led her to the remote city of Point Mettier—an odd town reached via a claustrophobic tunnel where all of its 205 full‑time residents lived in a single, monolithic high‑rise condo. In the end, Cara solved the case, a murder that was completely unconnected to the deaths of her loved ones.
Or was it?
Cara had walked away with a clue. It was on the cell phone of a deceased gang member she had never met before named Michael Lovansky: a photo of Aaron, Dylan, and Cara herself on the day they had left home for the Talkeetna wilderness. Why Michael Lovansky had this photo of her family was a tormenting mystery.
In the cemetery a sudden gust of wind picked up, coiling around Cara like a chilling, bodiless snake and making her shiver involuntarily. Was it a protest from the dead? Maybe she would never be able to get the answers she had been looking for. But she also knew that if she didn’t try, she could never put the past behind her to rejoin the land of the living.
Cara was startled by a hand on her shoulder. She turned to find the tall, suited cemetery representative who was overseeing the exhumation. “Would you like to head into the office? I can take over from here. I’ll make sure your family is properly handled and documented for the autopsy.”
Cara nodded. She was relieved not to have to watch the rest of the process. Instead, she scuttled away from the gaping black holes in the ground and headed toward the beige administrative building near the cemetery entrance where she would plan her next move. She wanted to keep herself busy while she waited for results. She would start with visiting the gang that Michael Lovansky had belonged to.
Almost all the gang members were non‑Native, but their leader had inserted himself into Chugach, an outlying Native village not far from Point Mettier, by marrying an elder’s daughter. In Chugach Village—a town too small to have its own police force and too remote for Alaska State Troopers to keep an eye on—it would be difficult to extract answers from Lovansky’s cohorts. But Cara had to try, and the only way to get to Chugach was to go through Point Mettier.
It was time to take a trip back to the city under one roof.
Excerpted from VILLAGE IN THE DARK by Iris Yamashita published by Berkley, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2024 by Iris Yamashita
