The time is the 1980s. The place is St. Louis, Missouri, once the country's fourth largest city, now the twenty-seventh: a fading river town whose only current claim to national attention is that it has chosen a young woman from Bombay, India to be its new police chief. No sooner has S. Jammu been installed, however, than the city becomes embroiled in a bizzare and all-pervasive political conspiracy.
"A novel so imaginatively and expansively of our times that it seems ahead of them."—Richard Eder, "The Los Angeles Times "
"A startling, scathing first novel about American ambition, power, politics, money, corruption and apathy."—Jeff Jarvis, "People"
"Franzen has managed to put together a suspense story with the elements of a complex, multilayered psychological novel . . . A riveting piece of fiction that lingers in the mind long after more conventional potboilers have bubbled away." —Peter Andrews, "The New York Times Book Review"
"Franzen goes for broke here--he's out to expose the soul of a city and all the bloody details of the way we live . . . Franzen has written a book of range, pith, intelligence."—Margo Jefferson, "Vogue"
"A weird hybrid of realism and fantasy: municipal science fiction. Everything proceeds from a daring, outrageously unlikely premise."—Terrence Rafferty, "The New Yorker"
"Mr. Franzen has proved with this im
"A suspense story with the elements of a complex, multilayered psychological novel...Lingers in the mind long after more conventional potboilers have bubbled away."--"The New York Times Book Review
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"A novel so imaginatively and expansively of our times that it seems ahead of them."--Richard Eder, "Los Angeles Times"
A suspense story with the elements of a complex, multilayered psychological novel...Lingers in the mind long after more conventional potboilers have bubbled away. "The New York Times Book Review"
A novel so imaginatively and expansively of our times that it seems ahead of them. "Richard Eder, Los Angeles Times""
"A suspense story with the elements of a complex, multilayered psychological novel...Lingers in the mind long after more conventional potboilers have bubbled away." --The New York Times Book Review
"A novel so imaginatively and expansively of our times that it seems ahead of them." --Richard Eder, Los Angeles Times
