The city is here for you to (ab)use

Jonathan Franzen is best known for 'The Corrections', but his debut novel 'The Twenty-Seventh City', first published in 1988, also garnered rave reviews. A thriller of politically motivated subterfuge and corruption set in St Louis in 1984, it's an impressively intricate work in which Franzen interweaves the lives of a vast array of characters, winding the various plot lines up like a coiled spring for the frenzied climax. He's perhaps at his best, though, in his evocations of place - through his eyes what would ordinarily be non-descript urban sprawl becomes somehow profound.

But there's still something curiously unsatisfying about the book - not least the fleeting relationship between its central characters, prominent businessman Martin Probst and corrupt police chief Jammu, which fails to convince. In hindsight it looks like a marvellously designed and constructed work of architecture, but one which arrests only the visual attention and leaves the emotions cold.

Perhaps I should have lost my Franzen virginity to 'The Corrections' instead. Hey ho, that's what comes of shopping for books at The Works - you take whatever you can get on the cheap.