A Place in the Wind (2017) by Suzanne Chapin

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

A Place in the Wind (2017)

by Suzanne Chapin

Lake Holly, New York

New York: 11/105

Upstate New York: 10/23

   A Place in the Wind (alarmingly subtitled "A Jimmy Vega mystery") is the last of the three books from the Buffalo, New York area. A book about African American factory workers, a Joyce Carol Oates book and this book:  that is what Buffalo and its hinterlands has to offer the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America.  I don't mind reading detective fiction but I'm not sure why editor Straight has included so much detective fiction and YA fiction but spurned Romance novels and children's books.  I mean, if you are going to be inclusive, be inclusive all the way.  Personally, I've never read a genre romance book but plenty of people do and they are certainly a part of the American literary identity. 

  This was an Audiobook I checked out from the library and I immediately regretted it.  The prose, I felt, was so clumsy that it really got in the way of the plot.  Also, the characters were not complicated- everyone was either good or bad and they all stayed that way throughout.  The actual mystery involved- the death of a young girl from a wealthy white family with suspicion falling on members of the (illegal) immigrant community- relies on the author concealing a very, very, important fact from the reader while otherwise pretending that we have access to the thought process of that character.  

  The ending literally made me laugh because I thought, any character in any book would have revealed the concealed fact on page one.  It's cheap, in other words.  I can see within the precincts of the 1,001 Novels project, how this book got included because it's about a Puerto Rican detective working in Buffalo New York, with a plot that deals with tensions between local whites and the immigrant community, arguably a plot that could have been as interesting without the mystery. 

   The bottom line is that I simply didn't think this was a very good book, I found the whole thing tedious.   This book pretty much ends the Buffalo/Syracuse portion of New York- only one more title remaining from this part of the country.  The rest of upstate is the Hudson River Valley down to the New York City suburbs.   Then...on to Manhattan. Or maybe I'll do New Jersey first and come back to Manhattan because New Jersey is only a dozen or so books.