This is interesting. I never thought of this before, but it's true- you don't see a lot of books that are set in the desert. I think it's the point where a lot of people aren't even aware that there are deserts in the US (when we used to meet with relatives in a different city, we'd always call our city 'the desert.' And when my cousin, who had only heard about our city from hearing us refer to it at get-togethers as 'the desert' came to visit for the first time, he said he was expecting sand dunes and camels.)