The gentrification plot : New York and the postindustrial crime novel For decades crime novelists have set their stories in New York City a place long famed for decay danger and intrigue. What happens when the mean streets of the city are no longer quite so mean In the wake of an unprecedented drop in crime in the 1990s and the real estate development boom in the early 2000s a new suspect is on the scene: gentrification. Thomas Heise identifies and investigates the emerging gentrification plot in contemporary crime fiction. He considers recent novels that depict the sweeping transformations of five iconic neighborhoods the Lower East Side Chinatown Red Hook Harlem and Bedford Stuyvesant that have been central to African American Latinx immigrant and blue collar life in the city. Heise reads works by Richard Price Henry Chang Gabriel Cohen Reggie Nadelson Ivy Pochoda Grace Edwards Ernesto Quiñonez Wil Medearis and Brian Platzer tracking their representations of broken windows policing cultural erasure racial conflict class grievance and displacement. Placing their novels in conversation with oral histories urban planning and policing theory he explores crime fictions contradictory and ambivalent portrayals of the postindustrial citys dizzying metamorphoses while underscoring the material conditions of the genre. A timely and powerful book The Gentrification Plot reveals how todays crime writers narrate the death or murder of a place and a way of life