That's one of the reasons why I loved that book more than the others. I mean, there are millions of books about New York, whatever, but books that really capture that sort of dying small town that aren't pretentious literary wankery are so few and far between. It was so vivid...

Detroit's sociology is hell of complex, and it's been fucked since 1967. I don't think it's small enough to die, at least not any time soon, but it's on its way to mutating into something--there are whole dead areas, and the infrastructure is fucked. The city is running out of money, so they recently decided to stop prosecuting nonviolent crimes; the police are famously known as being little more than a government-sponsored gang anyway.
*wants a Pendergast book set in Detroit, hah*