Excerpt from Spare Parts by Joshua Davis, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

The transformation was complete. West Phoenix was Hispanic. And while that population worked downtown or in East Phoenix—cleaning the city at night like ghosts that disappeared at sunrise—the doctors and engineers in Scottsdale and Mesa rarely ventured west. Various reasons were given: it was dangerous, it was dirty, it was hot.

"We looked with nothing but contempt at anything west of Central Avenue," says William Collins, a historian with the Arizona State Historic Preservation Office.

According to Jaquemart, the City of Phoenix historian, East Siders claimed they could never live on the West Side because the sun would be in their eyes as they drove downtown to work in the morning. Jaquemart's geography professor at ASU put it more succinctly:

"There's nothing worthwhile there."

Excerpted from Spare Parts by Lindsey Davis. Copyright © 2014 by Lindsey Davis. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.