I don't know; it seemed like for a mystery novel, the Minneapolis she had was maybe the right one. But maybe not: Kate Wilhelm's mysteries are half of them love-songs to Oregon, so apparently that sort of thing can feel appropriate to me in a mystery. And then again, Kate Wilhelm can get away with a lot for me, and she's One Of Us. Not a very good example of the difference between mystery and speculative genres, Kate Wilhelm, for obvious reasons.
I don't know. When I'm reading the mysteries themselves, I'm not always self-conscious about it, but when I think about them, I'm pretty aware of being in a different land than my own. Genre isn't meaningful for every reader, but it's meaningful for me, and mysteries only feel like mine individually, not collectively. So sometimes I try to poke at that and see why it is. I think the answer is somewhere in the difference between Sympathy Between Humans and War for the Oaks, but I could be wrong about that. Happens often, really.
