Reddick is a 30-something white artist who lives in Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, N.Y., and makes rent by working as an art handler. While on a job for the old-money Seward family on Manhattan's Upper East Side, he learns that the woman he encountered in the alley behind his apartment building the night before is the fiancée of scion Buckley Seward. And she has gone missing. From the Seward family's refusal to contact the police, Reddick draws an easy conclusion: Buckley would rather not admit that "his fiancée was out partying in a black neighborhood."
Spurred on and subsidized by a wealthy friend of the Sewards, Reddick turns detective, poking around his neighborhood in hopes of discovering what the missing woman was doing there. He constantly runs up against Restoration Heights, the unfinished towers whose construction has been halted for the winter. The site has been the source of much tension between the locals and the agents of gentrification; what's more, Reddick notes that it "could definitely hide a body."
Restoration Heights has all the signposts of a thriller, but it's ambitious enough to take on literary-powerhouse topics like white privilege, gentrification and selling out; the novel may remind readers of The Bonfire of the Vanities, minus the smirkiness. While HBO or one of its ilk would do well to snatch up the rights to Restoration Heights, a filmed treatment could hardly be more vivid than what debut novelist Wil Medearis--also a painter--has created with words on paper. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer