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The book opens in January 2009, when LeDuff is taken to an abandoned Detroit warehouse where a dead man lies encased in ice at the bottom of an elevator shaft while people play hockey on the frozen floor nearby. The body had reportedly been seen, and by some reported, without an official response. LeDuff uses the scene to show how neglect in a collapsing city can make death part of the scenery.
LeDuff embeds with Detroit firefighters facing routine arson in abandoned houses with failing equipment, broken alarms and supplies they sometimes buy themselves. The death of firefighter Walter Harris on November 15, 2008, when the roof of a burning vacant house collapsed, anchors the account. In the book, frontline workers absorb the cost of the city's cuts through personal sacrifice.
LeDuff argues that Detroit is not an anomaly but an early and extreme case of forces acting on the whole country: deindustrialization, the loss of middle-class manufacturing jobs, racial and fiscal abandonment of cities, and political corruption that feeds on scarcity. On this view the city's collapse is a preview, and examining its body is a way of diagnosing the nation before the same symptoms appear elsewhere.
LeDuff frames civic reporting as an autopsy and refuses the detached observer's stance, weaving in his own family's losses, including his sister's death and a niece's fatal overdose, alongside the city's morgue, fires and scandals. Treating private grief and public collapse as one body of evidence shows that institutional failure is lived as a string of individual deaths, and it makes the journalist's own proximity a source of authority rather than bias.