2013, a reprint from Baltimore Noir from USA Noir: Best of the Akashic Noir Series, pages 329-336

Easy As A-B-C is a dark-clear recollection. The narrator is a housing contractor in the upscale South Baltimore neighborhood of Locust Point. Like many such men he is a local; gutting and gentrifying the oldest working class residential neighborhood in Baltimore, the one that escaped the 1904 Baltimore Fire. Laura seems to have written this book in the early 2000’s when I was working in that neighborhood. I interviewed, drank with, and shot pool with many of the local housing contractors. These contractors were literally employed by culturally homogenous out-of-town upscale homesteaders to erase their own local culture even as they were being physically displaced.

The narrator happens to get a job renovating his mother’s childhood home, which has been purchased for many times what she sold it for by a haughty beauty named Deirdre, who easily seduces the married middle-aged father of two. The woman, for all of her attractiveness, and all of her appreciation of the character of the home she has purchased, has him systematically erase every trace of working class family existence from the structure, as was being done at an insect colonizing pace as this story was being written. The author definitely knows the neighborhood. The woman that the nameless contractor is seduced by is a stock urban gentry bitch of the kind that I am very familiar with. To have sketched the Deidre character too deeply would have been inauthentic.

Laura Lippman’s Easy As A-B-C is the story of urban gentrification on the American East Coast circa 2003. In many ways, it is the story of America.