I’ve read a number of books set in Salt Lake City. as i’ve noted before, most writers seem to get the geography mixed up pretty bad, althought Robert R. Irvine’s “Moroni Traveler” series gets it straight.
It wasn’t until I was halfway throught it that I realized that Margaret Atwood’s book The Handmaid’s Tale was set in a very recognizable Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Mystery writer Toni L.P. Kelner lives in Massachusetts, too, but grew up in the South. Most of her books are set in the South, but one is set in Cambridge.
Mystery Writer Janet Evanovich grew up in my home town of South River, N.J., and occasuinaly Stephanie Plum winds up there (although she’s more often in Trenton and at the Quaker Bridge Mall).
Stephen King’s Christine was set in Pittsburgh. Mostly, things rang true, but his off-hand reference to a Phillies game on the radio was a bit jarring.
James L. Burke’s series of mysteries about Dave Robicheaux, set in southern Louisiana. SWMBO grew up in New Orleans and when he gets into detail about travelling on a series of highways and winding up somewhere, odds are she’s been down one or more of those roads herself.
James D. MacDonald also put a Travis McGee novel in Houston. It was obvious he had been here and done some homework on the layout of the town. It is still amusing to read his description of Meyer’s panic-filled driving on the Houston highways.
Lee Killough, the science fiction author, set a trilogy of cop novels, set about 70 years in the future, in Topeka, Kansas, my home. She got the geography absolutlely right, except there were inevitable differences after that much time, new buildings and such. But even the touch of having names from the Oakland neighborhood be predominantly Hispanic rang true.
Some parts of Ender’s Game took place in Greensboro - that is, the times when he wasn’t in space. The geography was fine, I guess, since they only passingly mention a Lake Bryant.
My all time favorite (as of this summer :rolleyes: ) is Sara Paretsky and her V I Warshawsky series - I love reading about where I live within the context of a really good story.
Laura Lippman’s Tess Monaghan series of mysteries are mostly set in Baltimore. While I was reading one of the books, the action that I was reading was supposedly going on across the street from my apartment at the time. It was sort of a surreal feeling… I felt like looking out the window and waving or something.
Paden City, West Virginia seems to lack any kind of pull for authors (or readers for that matter) so you can imagine the excitement felt when a Paden City native decided to write a book based here. He changed the name of the towns and some of the people used in the book but Small Town Odds by Jason Headley is quite obviously about this town.
The excitement was truly overwhelming. Jason’s parents had been telling me to read his book so I went to the Paden City Library to get a copy (surely they would have more than one since this is the first back written by a “native”) and I was told that they were waiting for a library about an hour away to finish with a copy and send it down. Huh?
I asked random people, some of whom were included in the book if they had read it and I got the “What’s a book?” looks.
On a good note, Amazon got my copy to me two weeks before the library got theirs.
Upon preview, I realized that I am very grumpy today. No more posts for me.
Pretty much anything written by Tom Clancy. The Hunt for Red October had Jack Ryan visiting a Navy office in the neighborhood where I work, which really did have lots of Navy offices at the time.
Interesting how many of these seem to be mysteries.
The Chimney Sweeper by John Peyton Cooke is set in “Isthmus City” which is clearly Madison. The “skeleton in the chimney” part of the plot is based on an actual incident (which according to some fairly juicy and completely unsubstantiated gossip involves former higher-ups at the UW) but the rest of it is fiction.
A series of courtroom thrillers by William Bernhardt is set in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Most of the books have the word ‘Justice’ in their titles. They aren’t immensely good, but I enjoy them because of the Tulsa locations. It’s neat to see the names of streets, buildings, and parks that have personal meaning.
The most famous book I can think of that features Tulsa is the teen novel “The Outsiders,” which has made my old classmate Susie Hinton a very weathy woman.
