This Week's Sneak Peek

Debutante?

These days, I'm reading a mystery novel I had bought some time ago after chatting with the author at a book signing. It's set, for the most part, in St. Paul, Minnesota, featuring a detective originally from Colombia and three deaths that appear to have some connection to undocumented immigration from Mexico.

The author includes a lot of detail about St. Paul in the book — street names, the histories of some of the neighborhoods, etc. — but one thing stuck out like a sore thumb. Recounting the background of a deceased lawyer, one of the officers says that he had worked at one point in "the IDS Building in Minneapolis."

Someone from the Twin Cities would no more say "the IDS Building in Minneapolis" than a resident of New York would say "the Empire State Building in Manhattan," or a San Franciscan would say "the Golden Gate Bridge over the Golden Gate Strait."

Unless there's another IDS Building in Edina or St. Louis Park now.

All the same, I appreciate the author fleshing out St. Paul as a real place, and he clearly knows whereof he writes.

Unlike, say, whoever wrote that there is a Detroit-to-Racine ferry.

Oh, and is it really necessary to italicize "tortilla"?