In Harlem Shuffle and Crook Manifesto, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Colson Whitehead begins the story of Harlem furniture dealer and part-time fence Ray Carney. Cool Machine concludes the tale in three self-contained but interlocking stories, each set in a different year of the 1980s. Then, Ronald Reagan was in the White House, and Ed Koch sat in Gracie Mansion. Again and again, we come across Mayor Koch’s catchphrase, “How’m I doin’?” as Whitehead (through his characters’ eyes) surveys the wreckage that was New York City at the time. Because Cool Machine, like the two novels that precede it, is as much a portrait of America’s biggest city in that era as a tale of crime in Harlem.
A man of accomplishment
Ray Carney figures as the protagonist in the first and third of the three stories that comprise Cool Machine. We witness him growing in stature and self-confidence as he attains the pinnacle of his ambition as Sterling Furniture Northeast Regional Dealer of the Month. Carney lives and breathes furniture. But a large share, if not most, of the money that has financed his and his wife Elizabeth’s Strivers’ Row brownstone and her travel agency, has come from his sideline. Because Carney is Harlem’s go-to fence for serious thieves who disdain the small stuff. And only Carney can manage to unload major jewelry hauls or other big scores. The problem is, he’s now retired from the fencing game just when Elizabeth’s bank has turned her down for the loan she needs to expand her business.
Cool Machine (Harlem Trilogy #3) by Colson Whitehead (2026) 335 pages ★★★★☆
Three interlocking stories
A Hollywood-worthy caper
Carney Furniture is doing well, but not that well. So, for Carney, there’s only one choice. He turns to the legendary Harlem master thief Uncle Rich, joining his crew for a share in a huge score. They’re going to pull off a job at a shop inside the famous Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. It seems impossible. But Uncle Rich has done the impossible again and again in a storied career. And Whitehead’s tale of the caper is entertaining from beginning to end. If real crooks are halfway as clever as Uncle Rich, we’re in trouble.
That’s the first of the three stories. In the second, Pepper surfaces again. We’d met him in the first two books, because Pepper, now in his sixties, was an associate of Ray’s father on a number of capers way back when. Pepper has been laying back lately, plagued by recurring stomach pain. But Elizabeth hires him to guard an art dealer she knows who’s attempting to buy a rare and valuable African mask. And this story features not just suspense but a great deal of violence as well.
A race for a rare African mask, with bodies dropping
It turns out that the mask the dealer wants had been stolen from a vindictive Dutch collector who has no scruples about killing to get it back. And he has in his employ a large White man known as the Melancholy Hitman. He is, indeed, melancholy, and a hitman par excellence. It’s this shadowy figure who’s on Pepper’s trail. First, as Pepper follows the dealer and the briefcase full of money. Then, after the money’s been stolen and the mask still hasn’t turned up, when Pepper tries to track it down in the company of a young woman in a mohawk and combat boots. Bodies fall in this section.
Confronting the Mob
So much for the second of the three stories. In the third, Carney resolves to help save his “nephew” Robert (really the son of his late cousin Freddie). The cops are zeroing in on Robert for the murder of the corrupt lawyer he’d worked for. Enter the Mob. Because it was the son of a notorious Mob boss who’d killed the lawyer, violating orders from the Syndicate to avoid drawing attention at a time when all the big bosses are in prison on RICO charges. And these are the guys Carney’s bucking when he sets out to free Robert from suspicion. It’s a high-risk proposition. Carney might lose everything, including his life.
About the author
Colson Whitehead twice won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. First, in 2017, for The Underground Railroad, and again in 2020 for The Nickel Boys. He has also written seven other novels, including the three in this Harlem Trilogy, and two nonfiction books. Whitehead was born in 1969 in New York City and grew up there. He graduated from Harvard University, where he studied English and Comparative Literature. He lives in Manhattan with his wife and two children.
For related reading
Previously, I reviewed the first two novels in Whetehead’s Harlem Trilogy, Harlem Shuffle (Life and crime on the edge in Harlem) and Crook Manifesto (Colson Whitehead’s Harlem trilogy continues).
I’ve also reviewed one of the two books for which Whitehead won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction: The Nickel Boys (A brilliant novel dramatizes life under Jim Crow). I found that the other, The Underground Railroad, was not to my taste.
For an in-depth mainstream review of Crook Manifesto, see “Colson Whitehead Returns to Harlem, and His Hero Returns to Crime” by acclaimed author Walter Mosley (New York Times Book Review, July 13, 2023).
For a much earlier fictional portrayal of crime in Harlem, see A Rage in Harlem (Harlem Detectives #1 of 6) by Chester Himes (The famous Harlem Detectives enter a comic scene).
Not long ago I reviewed another novel in which Strivers Row figures in a major way: The Strivers’ Row Spy (Renaissance #1) by Jason Overstreet (African-American history comes to life in this engaging spy novel).
You might also care to see the 25 most enlightening historical novels or the Top 10 great popular novels
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