Short story collections: linked v mosaic : Danticat

Re-reading Edwidge Danticat's "The Dew Breaker," in prep for book group (tonight) and trying to piece together this mosaic. Seemingly Danticat, reacting against the supersaturation of "linked stories," which had become a writing-school cliche following success of several in the '80s, e.g., Minot's Monkeys (though the ancestry goes way back, say to Winesburg, Ohio, and others), told stories in an out-of-sequence way so that the connections would not be fully clear till the end of the set. Others have followed: Elizabeth Strout, Kate Walbert. Honestly, in all cases I wonder why they did this, if there was any conscious design at all. Why couldn't, shouldn't, the stories be told in sequence? In any event, Danticat's are not a perfectly linked set, except thematically (as in almost all story collections other than the few that dazzle by their variety): all are about Haitian exiles and their response to or recovery from the trauma of their youth (or of their parents' youth, in some cases). Several do concern the same set of characters, particularly the first and last stories, which are bookends, or more like the two sides of an old vinyl LP: in fact we experience the same phone conversation from both ends of the line. These stories about a Haitian enforcer assigned who kills a priest in prison and then marries and escapes to NYC. In the first story he reveals his secret past to his adult daughter; in the last, we see the events in the prison. In another of the (9) stories in the collection, we see him and wife and daughter going to church on xmas; another is of a young man back in Haiti reporting to his elderly aunt that he's found the man who killed his parents (not the same crime, but presumably the same character); a fifth story is of a samstress who imagines that the same ex enforcer lives in her neighborhood (she's interviewed by a young reporter, presumably a stand-in for Danticat). A sixth is of the basement rental in Brooklyn where perhaps the enforcer is a landlord, not clear. The other three stories connected in theme only: one about a boy in Haiti during an uprising, one about a Haitian nurse in an nyc hospital, can't recall the last.