Please do not be influenced by blurbs comparing this novel to Richard Price or Jay McInerney. There's no way. "Restoration Heights" has an unconvincing premise uncomfortably blended with gentrification angst that make it hard to struggle through.

Reddick is an artist living in the Bedford-Stuyvesant. neighborhood of Brooklyn, working as an art handler, moving and rehanging the art collections of very wealthy people. On his latest job, he realizes that the fiancee of the family scion is missing and that he, Reddick, may have been the last person to see her. Another uber-wealthy family asks him to look into what might have happened--why they would ask him to do this makes no sense: he's someone who packs and hangs art, not someone who is connected with anything or anyone.

Reddick becomes obsessed with his search, losing his job, his friends, and almost his mind. He turns up a few surprising things and learns something about his neighborhood that he didn't expect.

What I did like is that Wil Medearis spreads the gentrification anxiety around, with some of the African-American characters being its biggest supporters. There's no simple solution to the changes sweeping so many neighborhoods, and it was good to see a wealth of opinions represented.

A girl has gone missing in Bedford-Stuyvesant, a historically black Brooklyn neighborhood, and no one seems to care. Reddick, a white man, an artist, art mover, and basketball player is convinced that he spoke to Hannah Granger the night she disappeared. Hannah was the fiance of Buckley Seward, the only son of an extremely wealthy family, but Buckley and the rest of the Sewards refuse to involve the police or even believe that something untoward has happened to Hannah. Reddick embarks on an investigation that dives into the gentrification of Bed-Stuy, and causes him to question himself.

I had a difficult time enjoying this book. I think it is a well-written novel, but part of that comes from how much Reddick annoyed me as a character. His focus and obsession with the case, even when told by everyone around him that there is no case, just a woman who left her fiance, almost drove me away from the book. However, the events and discoveries that Reddick uses to create his theory of the case are things that could, in a poorly written mystery, actually be the story that is being told. He is caught up in a world where everything has a double meaning, and the other characters continue to tell him that sometimes things really are as simple as they seem.

The story may not have appealed to me as a mystery, but had I approached it as a social commentary novel based around the tropes of mysteries, I think I may have enjoyed it more. The heart of the novel is an exploration of the gentrification of the historically black neighborhood of Bed-Stuy, and how Reddick’s identity as a white man who lives in the neighborhood responds to the process. He does not see himself as part of the gentrifying force, citing his experiences growing up in a predominantly black neighborhood and his resistance and outrage over the new construction projects as reasons that he is part of the group that is being pushed out of the area. A number of characters challenge him on that front, pointing out that for all his experiences he will always be someone who moved into the area after completing art school, not someone who has been part of the ethos of the neighborhood since birth, and he can never share the experience of being black in Brooklyn.

Final verdict: While I did not particularly enjoy the book, I can see where others would. Great material for book groups that want to tackle gentrification, race, and wealth disparity, but I would hesitate to recommend it as a mystery.

I didn’t like this novel. There really was nothing wrong with it, but it wasn’t my type of novel. I wasn’t able to complete it, but I read enough of it to know I didn’t like it. I couldn’t relate to the main characters. The plot was interesting and distinctive; the writing was good and very descriptive. However, I didn’t enjoy reading it.
The description sounded like the type of novel I would like, so I selected it for reading and review. Having read about 30% of it, I decided I couldn’t read any further. I read the ending. The ending was good.
Thank you, Net Galley, and the publisher, for the opportunity to read and review this novel.

This book was a little hard for me to get into at first. I picked it up and put it down a few times. But I'm glad I picked it up and finished it. Once this book hit a certain pace about 50 pages in, it really drew me in and I knew I wanted to find out what happens. At times I found it hard to believe that Reddick would be that invested and determined to find out what happens to Hannah. But just when I would start doubting that anyone would be willing to go to the lengths that Reddick did, one of his friends would ask the same questions that would be running through my head. His friends seemed to be the voice of reason, and their questioning of Reddick and his motives allowed him to vocalize what he was thinking and let the reader into his head. This was very helpful in keeping the storyline believable for me.

I really enjoyed this book. There is mystery and suspense. The emotional dialogue on race, privilege, and gentrification were really enlightening to read. The book is an interesting glimpse into the world of art and real estate in New York City and makes you ask yourself some important questions.

*** 4 Stars ***
Reddick is an artist, working as an art handler, and living in a Brooklyn neighborhood. Hannah is a girl that goes missing and Reddick is the last person to see her, when he randomly meets her one night outside his building while taking out the trash. Issues between race and economic classes arise throughout this book during Reddick's work to find out what has happened to Hannah. I really enjoyed this book, there were definitely some slow parts and not a ton of action, but the ending picked up and brought everything together well, providing closure. I loved the character development and writing style. Some parts were a little wordy and could have been simplified but overall I really liked this book and would recommend it.

Special thanks to NetGalley and Hanover Square Press for this advance read copy in exchange for an honest review.

Restoration Heights surprised me in its reasonably accurate take on the gentrification of New York neighborhoods (authors typically miss the mark, especially those who never lived in Manhattan). It's also about a protagonist whose life is a mess and so he focuses on/obsesses over a missing woman he was the last to see alive. This is a competent missing person mystery that doubles as a commentary on race, corporate greed, and the changing face of modern day New York City. It's not a perfect read, but the author is talented enough to give us realistic dialogue, well-drawn supporting characters and a down-on-his-luck main character we. can root for throughout the book to find the girl and change his life once and for all.

Reddick worked as an art handler and spent his free time playing basketball at the Y, ignored his own painting career. On a winter’s night in his Brooklyn neighborhood Bedford-Stuyvesan, a young blond woman, drunk, followed Reddick into an alley and invited him to kiss her. He declined, offering instead to get her a ride home. Before he could call a car, she disappeared into his apartment building, apparently returning to a party that she’d momentarily escaped. The next day, he mined the story for laughs until a coworker reminded him that a woman went missing under similar circumstances in Coney Island a few years earlier and her body had been found on the beach. He began questioning his inaction, worrying about the fate of the girl.

That day he was working with a crew dismantling and installing art at the home of the Seward family, one of the wealthiest families in the country and a patron of the arts. While at their home, he learns the woman he encountered the night before was Hannah, the fiancee of Buckley Seward, the family’s only child. He was eager to share his information, but the family was hostile, demanding he refrain from contacting them about Hannah or going to the police hardly veiling that they would have him fired if he disobeyed.

Aghast at their reaction and convinced Hannah was in peril if not dead, Reddick began his own investigation. As he uncovered the layers of relationships in the Seward family and among Buckley’s friends, he confronted the scourge of gentrification in his neighborhood, the specter of a mysterious crime boss, The Genie, and his own racial identity.

Something about the book grabbed me, and I stayed up almost all night reading it. I enjoyed the writing style and was invested not just in the mystery of Hannah’s disappearance but in the question of Reddick’s investment in the case. The characters engaged in difficult and honest questions about race, class, and privilege. Fittingly, these themes were never resolved but offered continual touchpoints throughout the novel. The book also returns to the idea of biases that distort the truth, and Reddick must confront his own assumptions as he unfurls the connections between Hannah, his neighborhood, and the elite world of the Sewards.

In the vein of Visitation Street by Ivy Pochoda, Restoration Heights vividly evokes a Brooklyn neighborhood and its class and racial tensions. Wrapped in the guise of a mystery, Restoration Heights delivers much more.

Restoration Heights: A Novel by Wil Medearis is a complex look into racial inequality and tensions between the have and have nots, as well as your rank in society and who you know or think you know. It is a thought provoking book which has similarities of the times we are living in today. Thrown into the mix is a missing person mystery which adds another layer of intrigue to an already multi layered story.

Reddick is a struggling white artist living in Brooklyn who has a memorable encounter with a beautiful affluent blonde girl named Hannah. Reddick's primary job is working for a company which moves artwork. He ironically overhears a conversation between their latest client and her son about the son's fiancé going missing. Riddick sees her picture and realizes this is Hannah.

He tells them he has seen her and is suddenly hired to look into what happened to her. Hence begins a story of race, money, greed and class status. It also shows what some will do in order to survive both emotionally as well as financially.

Reddick, who for his own personal reasons, begins a crusade to find the missing girl. During his journey he begins to see the complexities of race and its unfairness in inner city life and what it takes to survive in a neighborhood where new people are moving in and trying to change the lifestyle many who have lived there all their lives are use to.

Restoration Heights is a thought-provoking mystery which makes you think and feel until the last page.
Thank you netgalley.com and Harlequin for the advanced copy. The book will be out in January, 2019.

Reddick is an artist living in New York City, yet makes his living delivering and hanging art for wealthy clients. His life is thrown into turmoil when he’s one of the last people to see the fiancé of his current client before she goes missing. He’s quickly and mysteriously hired by another society family to look into the disappearance. Restoration Heights follows Reddick’s hunt to find out what happened to Hannah as he navigates the class, cultural, and racial ‘layers of New York.’

He’s caught between two rich families and the disappearance of a white girl in a gentrified neighborhood, from the Upper West Side to Bedford-Stuyvesant. Reddick is confronted by the slight of wealth-angled vision, the well-heeled art establishment family doesn’t believe him, and as a white man, many of the African-Americans in his Harlem neighborhood don’t trust him. He's puzzled by key questions throughout the narrative, but soldiers on in some moral  Why does he take the ‘job?’ Why does the other family ‘hire’ him? He’s forced to question his own and other’s motivations throughout the book.

Once you accept the New-York coincidence (the fact that the Upper West Side fiancé is last seen outside Reddick’s Bed Stuy apartment building), the reader can enjoy Medearis’s very good writing. In Restoration Heights, he provides searing commentary on gentrification, on athletes, on white rage, on the art community, and education vs experience. It is a good mystery that provides more than just a hunt for the plot’s truth. With a quick nod to Mosely, Medearis is a writer to be followed.

Thank you to NetGalley, Hanover Square Press, and Wil Medearis for an advanced copy for review.

3.5 stars Thanks to NetGalley and Hanover Square Press for allowing me to read and review this ARC. Publication Feb 1, 2019.

Hannah is missing!! Reddick was the last one to see her. This sits very heavy on his heart and mind. It consumes him. They are virtually strangers. He has let his own faltering career decline, he loses his job, he begins to lose friends. He is consumed with the disappearance of Hannah. He must find her. Is she buried under the new urban high rise being built? Just who is to blame - her fiancee or the man she is cheating with, who is a long time friend of her fiancee?

This story is so much more. It speaks to the decline of a black neighborhood and the separation of the middle and the wealthy classes. We see Reddick, a white man, living comfortably in an all black neighborhood, trying desperately to prevent the corporate world from redesigning and changing it's culture, while hitting a brick wall from both the developers and the neighborhood itself. We see the wealthy and the down trodden. We see the good in people and also the vile, reprehensible underworld.

This is not a mere mystery, but a mystery set in the present day upheaval of ethnic neighborhoods against corporate greed.

A timely book that addresses many current topics (race, wealth, privilege, and identity) with a mystery backdrop.

See full review here:

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2391331129

The story opens with Reddick making a chance acquaintance with an inebriated woman as he steps outside into the alley to set out his trash. Although she's willing to follow him inside into his Brooklyn apartment, he urges her to go back to the party that she left. He watches as she's guided inside.

A struggling artist, Reddick earns his living working for a company that hangs art work inside the homes of wealthy clients. There he learns that the wealthy client's son is distraught that his fiance Hannah is missing. When Reddick sees her picture he realizes that the blonde he met in the alley is Hannah.

This begins a quest in which Reddick is compelled to find either the girl or discover what happened to her. The setting is Bedford-Stuyvesant and Restoration Heights is a gentrification project that's changing the community. The story focuses on the consequences of gentrification for the community and the problems with racial stereotypes. An underlying theme centers on Reddick's lack of enthusiasm for his own career. Between spending time shooting hoops at the Y and obsessing over Hannah's plight and investigating his own theories of what might have happened, he's eventually forced to consider his own future as well as the future of a rapidly changing community.

I received this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and found it a great addition to my collection of books exploring Brooklyn's sociological history.

This book is not just about a mystery but also entwines the subject of gentrification, in this case, in the Bed-Stuy area of New York City. All of the issues embedded in that subject, poverty, racism, the haves and have nots are weaved throughout the story. Unfortunately I found it difficult to get through as the story of the missing girl was not something that was able to keep my attention. I would have preferred a book about gentrification that was not posing as a mystery novel!

For the past ten years there have been more novels written about the encroaching gentrification of formerly run down New York neighborhoods, with varying results. Mostly they concern residents who were holdovers from an earlier day when the area rents were affordable, and their efforts to hold onto their homes, realizing their days under rent control were numbered and they'd be hard put to find a new place. Wil Medaris has kicked it up a notch by throwing in a mystery. Reddick, his protagonist who is a stalled artist working for a company that stores and hangs art collections of the 1%, finds himself an unlikely detective in trying to find what happened to a missing girl. We are given insights into building sites in Bed/Stuy, concrete office buildings in Williamsburg, and 5 story townhouses in the upper East Side of Manhattan. But Brooklyn is ground zero, and I particularly liked descriptions of the artist collectives as well as Reddick's thoughts as he relaxed shooting hoops. As housing becomes harder and harder for the urban resident to attain and retain, anyone who has been in a bidding war will recognize the situation. But Reddick who is 1/4 African American but bears white skin, blond hair, shares an identity crisis with his neighborhood, My 3 start rating is due to the fact that the book, while intriguing and raising many contemporary issues, is quite repetitive and could have been trimmed by at least a 1/3.

Race. Identity. Art. Money. Race. Class. Gentrification. Sex. These are the central themes of Restoration Heights. The search for a missing person is an excuse for the plot, but almost a side issue. Everyone around Reddick is trying to talk him out of looking for Hannah, who seems to be missing. But no one else is concerned. So why is he? He didn't know her, just met her the night she disappeared.

I started reading this expecting a mystery, and with that expectation, the plot really dragged. But once I switched mindsets to focus on the background of gentrification and race, and stopped expecting action or clues, I sank deep into the storyline, enjoying it a great deal. It's a really interesting read. I imagine it will be good group discussion fodder. Meanwhile I'll continue to hmmmm about it for a few days...

I got a copy to review from Net Galley.

**Netgalley free copy received.

Rating: 3.4 / 5

"The guilty thrill of being surrounded by blackness without having to live like them. Not separate but unequal...The truth was that it looked like a good place to hide a body."

It's little snippets of description like this, as well as the character of Reddick himself, that make this a quick and relatively enjoyable read. To be honest, not exactly my cup of tea as much as I thought it would be based on the summary, but good enough to enjoy over an afternoon of literal tea.

The story starts off with Reddick, more or less an everyman sort of character, a white artist living in Restoration Heights--aka white people's building in a mostly-black neighborhood. (Not sure if it's all black, because it's described as "mixed", but since Reddick himself is "mixed" but looks all-white, I'm not sure if there are mixed messages with this, but oh well.) Anyways, he's walking along, minding his own business and tossing out his garbage in an alley, when crazy-drunk girl Hannah starts flirting(?) with him, goes into the building to a "party", and is never seen again.

Flash-forward to the next morning, and Reddick is trying to explain things to the girl's fiance and his family, but, being rich, snobby, and "I'm too superior to listen to you", Reddick ends up being spurred by said rich family's neighbor(?) Mrs. Leland instead, both interested in the bare principles of "what's wrong and right". So...justice.

Anyway, the story follows Reddick in his pursuit of finding out what happens to Hannah, and, as promised, the journey does shake his morals and fundamentals, even gets the reader thinking as well. The entire story takes place over approximately a nine-day period, but at times, it feels longer than that. Because of this, the fact that the ending was....yeah, not at all something that I enjoyed in this context (though I have liked those sorts of endings in other works), and also that I wasn't always sure what was happening or the who's-who (description wasn't always clear in this book, like the author expected us to already know some details, either that or the details weren't deserving of more description, in which case I think he might have left them out altogether), while I do think this book deserves perhaps a one-time read, I don't see myself going back to it necessarily, or even recommending it. If it's someone else's cup of tea though, I guarantee you'll find something in it to love.

With that being said, I'd actually like to quote the very last line of the book in describing my feelings about this as being distinct overall: "...was surrounded by them, consumed--you look and look but you'll never see the difference."

So....another book.

Restoration Heights is a mystery novel that is of interest to anyone who has ever wanted to help someone. In his debut mystery novel Wil Medearis introduces us to Reddick, a young white artist turned detective in a historical black Brooklyn neighbourhood. Reddick’s imagination leads him in many directions when he decides against everyone’s advice to help a young woman he believes has been kidnapped and possibly murdered.

Reddick is an unfulfilled artist who works crating and moving other people’s art and hanging it on other’s people’s walls. One night, while taking out the garbage, he is approached by a young woman who makes a pass at him and then quickly disappears. The next day while working in the mansion of one of the richest families in the world he realizes that the same girl is the fiancé of his client’s son. When he sets off the alarm the family tells him there is nothing to worry about. Regardless, Reddick just can’t stop thinking about the young woman and the search begins. He is basically taken down two paths one where he mingles with the rich who insist he doesn’t belong and the other where he wallows in the underbelly of criminal society, which threatens to cause him harm. All the time he is asking himself “Where is the girl?”

I really enjoyed the protagonist in the story. Reddick truly wants to help but he is an inexperience detective. When he bounces ideas off his friends they all say, “Stop this or you will get yourself killed!” He goes down many tracks and has to backtrack many times when his basic assumptions prove wrong. He is not brilliant or exceptionally tough. He just wants to help. He could be anyone of us. What’s not to love about this guy?

The story is exceptional. We are introduced to the clash of the world of artists who are just getting by and the world of real estate, which threatens their existence. Has their been a crime? Who is the criminal? Shouldn’t the police be called? All these questions come up continuously and few of them are answered until the end of the book. I highly recommend this book to those that love a good story with lots of interesting characters and strong character development.

I would like to thank NetGalley and Hanover Square Press for providing me with a copy of this excellent book in exchange for a fair review.

Enjoyable story.... was a little slow to start but enjoyed the story... not sure I would recommend by both my mom and I enjoyed it...

Though a lot of this is highly improbable and I did guess at the relationship between the 2 cousins at the first mention of the older, politico, this was a non-put-downable read-- very well written with interesting "hero" and other characters and NYC and real estate details. Reddick and his friends certainly consume more drinks (in this case the emphasis is on beer), than the main couple in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolff? My quibbles aside, this would make a good movie-- especially with producers looking for pertinent social backgrounds and a story calling for diversity in the cast.

Those of us living in the ever changing, gentrifying environs of New York City will easily be pulled into this very odd mystery revolving around the obsessive search for a mysterious young woman who may have been killed.

The main character, Reddick becomes submerged in his search for Hannah, who he believes might be the victim of a crime. His search takes the reader through the hipster art community, the homes of the wealthy and the issues surrounding gentrification and displacement in many neighborhoods.

We get to meet many interesting people during his search, but I felt there were too many characters involved and were hard to keep track of. I enjoyed the main plot line but I found it obfuscated by the many, many subplots surrounding Reddick.

Certainly an interesting read for book clubs which will give the readers lots of material for discussions.