The blood sport that is New York real estate is rife with billion-dollar feuds. There's a story behind every eye-popping apartment sale and audacious new development in New York City, and many of those stories involve the uber-wealthy behaving badly.

THE NEW KINGS OF NEW YORK: Renegades, Moguls, Gamblers and the Remaking of the World's Most Famous Skyline charts the extraordinary transformation of America's greatest city from a near-bankrupt urban combat zone into the land of Billionaires' Row and Hudson Yards—a luxury playground for the global 1 percent—and provides an inside look at the bombastic personalities behind the biggest real estate deals of this century.

The first two decades of the 21st century were a giddy, hyperbolic era of dizzying highs and deep, dark lows. The headlines told the story: the world's biggest (and most disastrous) real estate transaction, the largest private development in U.S. history,…