Set in Chicago during the late 1970s, "Record Palace" is an eccentric debut novel about jazz, art, race, and identity. <BR>In hazed heat, mid-September, walking north from Chicago's Loop, telling myself I was exploring the new life, I dogged as much for tonic, gin. A sign swung beside a basement door, in, out, mirage: Record Palace: J ZZ. Inside I found Acie. <BR>Cindy, a lean, lonely white girl, has come to Chicago to study art history, to be anywhere but where she came from--tract housing in Thousand Oaks, California; mock-stucco buildings; "incessant sun and incessant sunniness of every blonde girl." <BR>Record Palace, littered with cans of malt liquor and remnants of past meals, also has boxes upon boxes of records--all jazz. And it has Acie, "big on all sides, top included. A hairnet, the hair below the net long and limp with oil. Green stretch pants, flip-flops, a thin black U-tank taut across Sumo folds." Cindy knows she doesn't belong, and this is why she stays. <BR>Cindy's determination leads to a tentative friendship with Acie, and she becomes a familiar, if not fully understood, presence in the store. But it is through her chance meeting with Acie's son that she becomes embroiled in an unusual crime. <BR>With prose that resembles the syncopated rhythms of jazz, Susan Wheeler offers a stunning portrait of a woman searching for an identity.<BR>

"Poet Wheeler (Smokes; Ledger) riffs on lingerers at the eponymous Chicago record shop in a novel with all the snazzy syncopation of the jazz at its heart. Cindy, a recent California transplant, is supposed to be studying art history at the University of Chicago, but more often she's drinking in bars and looking through the selection at the dark and dingy but fully stocked music store owned by Acie Stevenson, a fat, jaded jazz lover staring 60 in the face. Cindy's also nursing an attraction to one Harnett Mtukufu, a music reporter and radio deejay who's later revealed to be Acie's irresponsible son, Bowtie. Enter also Philomena Stevenson, Acie's newly widowed white sister-in-law, who's got breasts like 'bombs trussed up in cotton lace' and a mouth to match. It spells trouble for Acie first, who gets beat up in the club where he's taken Cindy for her birthday, and pretty soon it'll spell trouble for others, as Cindy's knowledge of art and art collecting proves useful for Bowtie's business in art forgeries as well as for recognizing the sketches in Acie's nasty bathroom as being valuable pieces by a German artist she's currently studying. Shifting narrators allow Wheeler's feel for the subtle variations in vernacular to shine in this knotty but mesmerizing little novel. (June)" Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)