The Twenty-Seventh City

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.