Cool machine : a novel / Colson Whitehead.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

From #1 New York Times bestselling author and two-time Pulitzer winner Colson Whitehead, an exuberantly entertaining novel that brings to life 1980s New York in the magnificent final volume of his Harlem Trilogy

1981. New York City is beginning to emerge from financial ruin and decline, energized by rampant real estate development and a Wall Street unchained by Reagan-era predatory capitalism. Up in Harlem, successful business owner/master fence Ray Carney has just been named Sterling Furniture's Dealer of the Month. When the banks won't give his beloved wife Elizabeth a loan for her new travel agency, however, Carney gambles on one last heist, and finds himself entangled with a legendary criminal mastermind.

1983. To some, Carney's friend and partner in crime, Pepper, is a stone-cold sociopath. To others, a top thief with questionable people skills. Either way, he's feeling his age in his troubled gut and his aching bones. When he takes on a bodyguard gig as a favor to Elizabeth, he's plunged into the alien territory of the East Village art and club scene. Luckily for him, whether you're uptown or down, everyone speaks the same language of violence--Pepper is a native speaker.

1986. Carney has always been haunted by his inability to save his cousin Freddie. Now, twenty years after Freddie's death, he has a chance to rescue Freddie's son from the violent forces of the city. But coming out of retirement and teaming up with Pepper again will mean risking the safety and security he's spent decades building for his family, with only one shot to get it right.

With his usual pitch-perfect prose, Whitehead paints a portrait of a city in transition, where shimmering skyscrapers rise to the heavens as displaced people huddle in abandoned tunnels below. In a dazzling display of protean imagination, Cool Machine roves all over the city, from Windows on the World to the Meadowlands, to show that in New York, and in the lives of Whitehead's vivid characters, it's what's below the surface that reveals the truth.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

In the final "Harlem Trilogy" title (after Harlem Shuffle), Ray Carney, owner of Carney's Furniture in Harlem, is feeling the middle-age blues. His material success flourishes. His wife runs a popular travel agency. They enjoy empty-nest living on ritzy Riverside Drive. Then the lure of his criminal past seduces him into the thrills of a perfect crime, a career capstone. In 1981, he falls in with Uncle Richie's scheme to do a con so big that he can retire. In 1983, his good buddy Pepper needs help with a job gone wrong, when $80,000 and a rare Ngil mask both go missing. In 1986, Ray takes on the burden of saving his grand-nephew's life when the boy makes an error while working for a crooked lawyer. Whitehead let loose vigorous creative energies to power this portrayal of New York City as a cruel machine with a flourishing top layer grinding down the little people below. Ray lives in the space between, selling furniture out front but conniving through the side door. VERDICT The plotting is intricate, the heists violent, the human fears palpable. Real events and references to the trilogy's earlier books make Whitehead and Ray an unforgettable pairing.--Barbara Conaty

Publishers Weekly Review

Whitehead concludes his Harlem Trilogy (after Crook Manifesto) with a transcendent and wildly entertaining novel in which his recurring characters grapple with the ways their lives are defined by crime and the city they call home. In 1981, furniture dealer and semiretired fence Ray Carney, now an empty nester, helps move a hot sapphire necklace, telling himself he's taking the risk for his wife, a travel agent trying to put out her own shingle. Soon, though, he gets in deeper than he'd bargained for, joining a crew for an ambitious heist at the Waldorf Astoria hotel. He compares his evolution as a criminal to the "churn" of the ever-changing metropolis, where transplants to the city outnumber those who left for the suburbs. Two years later, Carney's old friend and associate Pepper faces a reckoning of his own. Getting on in years and stumbling after a botched job, Pepper commits to recovering a precious African mask from an unscrupulous downtown art dealer despite feeling left behind by the city, where "maybe the game had changed, too." The saga concludes in 1986, when Carney weighs how much to help a nephew in danger. The heists, stakeouts, and showdowns are rendered with grit and precision, but the real wallops come in breathtaking riffs on the city's magnetic force, for instance when Carney, remembering the 1981 film Escape from New York, recognizes that leaving town would be like "going on the lam from yourself." It's the greatest New York novel in years. Agent: Nicole Aragi, Aragi Inc. (July)

Booklist Review

Ron Carney, a respected businessman and a fence, is the star of Whitehead's electrifying Harlem Trilogy, but New York City is its supernova: "a monstrous entity powered by innate miseries, operated by brute will, and held together by pluck, fury, and rebar." Harlem Shuffle (2021) burns through the 1960s. Crook Manifesto (2023) illuminates the 1970s. The final novel, a glorious fusion of crime, rebel creativity, and metaphysics, dissects the 1980s. In the first section, Carney, basking in the success of his Harlem furniture store, can't resist joining a couple of daring heists, proving to be a "cool machine." Next up, longtime enforcer and thief Pepper can't refuse a bodyguard gig for an art collector and client of Carney's travel-agent wife who attempts to do a deal in the graffitied, crack-ravaged, No Wave East Village. Finally Carney gambles everything he has, his life included, to save the son of his late, troubled cousin Freddie. Every page is incandescent with longing, doubts, calculations, and determination as Whitehead's magnetic characters are pushed to the limits and the city roils. Whitehead gets every gritty, absurd, tender detail just right as he maps the eighties zeitgeist and its foreshadowing of our own, revealing an immense web of malfeasance. This is a masterwork of crime fiction infused with labyrinthine suspense; brilliant, witty, and dynamic social insights; and profound questions of survival.

Kirkus Book Review

Whitehead's justly celebrated Harlem Trilogy comes to a triumphant, satisfying conclusion. The two-time Pulitzer Prize winner has brought his decades-long saga of furniture retailer and part-time criminal fence Ray Carney into the 1980s, a time of starkly mixed blessings for a New York City galvanized by reckless real estate development, plagued with widespread homelessness, and immersed in crime and corruption of gaudy proportions. As with its two predecessors,Harlem Shuffle (2021) andCrook Manifesto (2023), this installment carves its historic period into three self-contained but interwoven stories set in three different years. The first takes place in 1981, when Ray, flush with pride over being named Sterling Furniture's "Northeast Regional Dealer of the Month," is confounded when wife Elizabeth is denied a loan for her travel business. So, to get her the money she needs, he joins a crew led by the redoubtable Uncle Rich, a legendary thief, embarking on a near-impossible heist at the Waldorf Astoria. Elizabeth also spearheads the second installment, which takes place two years later, when she recruits the dyspeptic Pepper, Ray's friend and sometime coconspirator, as bodyguard for a jittery art dealer carrying a valuable African mask. When that object goes missing, Pepper and a hip young woman bearing a mohawk haircut and combat boots wander the seedier streets of Manhattan to locate it, crossing paths with a "Melancholy Hitman" also frantically pursuing the mask and leaving mutilated corpses in his wake. In the final section, taking place in 1986, Ray struggles to fulfill a posthumous obligation to his ill-fated cousin, Freddie, by using all his hard-earned wiles as salesman and felon to save Freddie's son, Robert, from being framed (or worse) in the murder of a bent Queens lawyer. It's as improbable as packing three page-turning thrillers into one book that's sustained throughout by rich, engaging characterizations and lucid, provocative reflections on a community, a city, and a people which it presents as both exasperating and captivating with equal intensity. A master novelist in full command of his powers as a storyteller, prose stylist, and social observer. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.