Restoration Heights

December 1, 2018
Medearis' moody debut is a sensitive portrait of gentrifying Brooklyn dressed up as a whodunit.Reddick, an artist resigned to art-handling, meets a drunk girl in an alley in Bedford-Stuyvesant and then watches her suddenly disappear into a house. It could be nothing, but it isn't: At work the next day, he learns that the fiancee of Buckley Seward--scion of one of the wealthiest art collecting families in New York--is missing. Reddick is hanging drawings at the Sewards' estate when he sees the picture: Buckley holding the hand of a thin blonde woman, who is exactly the same thin blonde woman he met in a Brooklyn alley the night before. That she was ever in an alley in still-gentrifying Brooklyn doesn't make sense. That the family won't enlist the help of the police doesn't make sense, either. Nor does it make sense to Reddick that, while the Sewards seem to rebuff his help, a different wealthy family is willing to bankroll his rogue investigation, but he'll take it. "I have to do something," he tells his friends. But what opens as a maybe-murder mystery quickly spirals into something else: a novel as concerned with the politics of a changing neighborhood as with finding the missing girl--a girl who may or may not actually be missing. As he peels back the layers around Buckley Seward and his associates, Reddick finds himself entrenched in the world of Brooklyn real estate while grappling with his own position as an outsider, as he's forced to examine his motivations. "It's very...it's just so white male," a friend says of his renegade investigation. "Like you're the neighborhood's steward, and if you don't look out for it, no one will." (While noble in both concern and scope, the novel is not especially subtle.) Twisty and ambitious and pleasantly brooding, it's a compelling read, if a somewhat convoluted one.Socially conscious Brooklyn noir.

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Starred review from December 15, 2018
This stunning debut opens boldly with the word You, as did Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City (1984), and readers are likely to make other comparisons between the two, though Restoration Heights stands apart because of an added element of mystery. Reddick, a young artist living in Bedford-Stuyvesant, has a strange encounter with an intoxicated young woman outside his apartment building, and when he asks after her the next day, she seems to have disappeared. Her fianc� and his wealthy Upper East Side family refuse to call the police, and Reddick finds new purpose by pouring his creative energy into an investigation that takes him and the reader on a disquieting, sometimes dangerous ride through a city overrun by greedy developers and beset by issues of class and race. Longtime residents of his own neighborhood have seen their traditional haunts replaced by gluten-free bakeries, fair-trade coffeehouses, and shops where cheese sells for $49 a pound. Bed-Stuy is no longer a place that things happen in but a place that things happen to. This is an instant New York fiction classic, exuding dark poetry from a lyrical narrative populated by well-defined characters in carefully, or, shall we say, artistically, arranged settings. Best recommended to a younger, hip audience or to aging McInerney fans who remember Bright Lights, Big City with fondness.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)

August 1, 2018

An aspiring young artist who supports himself by packing, moving, and hanging works for the wealthy learns about a missing woman he may have seen at his apartment building before she was mysteriously pulled into a side door. With a 75,000-copy first printing.

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