Cool Machine Author: Colson Whitehead ISBN-13: 978-0349727677Publisher: FleetGuideline Price: £22; 368ppEven crooks and thugs retire eventually, and in Cool Machine, the fast-paced final volume of Colson Whitehead’s brilliant Harlem Trilogy, furniture salesman and part-time fence Ray Carney and his sidekick, Pepper, are getting old and winding down.Pepper is starting to feel the effect of years of physical fights and bad food. Carney is preoccupied with where to hang his “furniture dealer of the month” plaque. But then comes the opportunity for one more heist.Lucrative and dangerous, the heist has another goal: to steal back Jesse Owens’s Olympic medal from a white collector. Repatriation is one of the themes of this book, and a later theft involves an African mask. In Whitehead’s first two books, white people were obstacles but otherwise unimportant; in Cool Machine, Black characters are seeking justice.Carney doesn’t need to return to crime, but he can’t stay away. He’s “a cool machine,” one character says; it’s in his blood. Of course, furniture is in his blood as well, and no matter the danger, Carney can’t help but pause and admire a thug’s choice of coffee table or easy chair.It’s this juxtaposition of perilous and mundane, terror and humour, that keeps these books zipping along. But their acute social observation and depictions of New York City make them more than entertaining crime capers. Two-time Pulitzer winner Whitehead is a cool machine himself, moving confidently through social classes, time and the neighbourhoods of the city.As with his previous books, Cool Machine is divided into three stories, each a couple of years apart. It’s the 1980s now, and New York is booming. Gentrification is edging into Harlem. The dive bar that served as their headquarters is now a yuppie bar. Loot has become prosaic; instead of jewels, they’re stealing coaxial cable. “There comes a time,” a character says, “when you have to ask yourself, What’s worth stealing? Truly of value. Not to the world – to you.” It’s a question that pulses through the book – what really matters? A blend of bone-chilling violence, humour and sharp social criticism, the last in the trilogy traces not just the evolution of Carney, but of New York City itself.Laurie Hertzel is a writer and critic in Minnesota and the author of two memoirs, News to Me: Adventures of an Accidental Journalist and Ghosts of Fourth Street.