New York crime caper: Cool Machine, by Colson Whitehead, reviewed

Lindsay Johns

Colson Whitehead

Fleet, pp. 368, £22

Cool Machine, the final novel in Colson Whitehead’s Harlem trilogy (following Harlem Shuffle and Crook Manifesto), is another tour de force and a fitting conclusion to the Uptown peregrinations of his endearing protagonist Ray Carney, a successful Harlem furniture salesman and part-time fence.

It’s an old-school crime caper, set in 1980s New York against the backdrop of Mayor Koch’s rapidly gentrifying city, told in three interconnected sections excoriating Reagan-era capitalism. The ubiquitous construction works, graffiti and corruption are fuelled by the twin deities of power and money.