Cool Machine: A Novel (The Harlem Trilogy Book 3)

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.

Colson Whitehead is the author eight novels and two works on non-fiction, including The Underground Railroad, which received the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the Carnegie Medal, the Heartland Prize, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Hurston-Wright Award, and was longlisted for the Booker Prize. The novel is being adapted by Barry Jenkins into a TV series for Amazon. Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys received the Pulitzer Prize, The Kirkus Prize, and the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction.

A recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a MacArthur Fellowship, he lives in New York City.

NAMED A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK BY The New York Times, The New Yorker, TIME, Vulture, Today.com, Esquire, Harper's Bazaar, LitHub, Bookriot

“The best reason to come to Cool Machine . . . is to drink in Whitehead’s intellectual breadth, his ambivalent irony, his moral seriousness and pinball verbal play. . . . His sentences are a rhythmic barrage. This is bodega realism. He deals out his cards as deftly as did Ricky Jay. He doesn’t ‘waste’ his gifts on a crime novel; he casually slips the genre’s boundaries. . . . Whitehead cracks the city open like a crab and pulls out the meat.”
—Dwight Garner, The New York Times Book Review

“A dizzyingly brilliant measure of the versatility and depth of the acclaimed author’s literary talent.”
—Leigh Haber, The Los Angeles Times

“Exquisitely paced crime-fiction drama. . . . Beautifully moving. . . . Cool Machine is definitive not only for its sweep but also for the rightness, the evocative precision, of the details that fill its paragraphs like the mystery mix inside the skin of a Gray’s Papaya hot dog. . . . [Cool Machine is] propelled by narrative; populated by colorful but believable characters larger enough than life to fit into life if only life were larger; and written in tight, muscular prose designed to entertain and, in the process of entertaining, provoke for the sake of a moral imperative.”
—The Atlantic

“Cool Machine bids farewell to Ray Carney in a witty, bloody, and unexpectedly moving finale to the Harlem Trilogy. . . . One of the richest portraits of New York. . . . So cinematic the book should come with a bucket of popcorn. . . . A delight. . . . It’s probably illegal to have this much fun writing a crime novel. . . . Who else makes a sentence work so hard without breaking a sweat?”
—Ron Charles

“Cool Machine is a hugely satisfying conclusion to a towering achievement. . . . In every genre he works in, Whitehead is a writer of seemingly effortless style. . . . A rich vision of both the nature of individual aspiration and the history of this period in Harlem. . . . This trilogy of unapologetic crime novels may be Whitehead’s most important and affecting work yet.”
—The Financial Times

“This volatile period of American life—political revolution, social upheaval, economic strife—isn’t background; it’s the very racket inspiring the felonious matrices Whitehead has woven around his characters.”
—The Boston Globe

“Whitehead is one of the few novelists whose jokes can provoke actual laughter. . . . Trenchant and compelling. . . . New York has never had a better valentine.”
—The Economist
“Vivid, pulpy, compulsively readable. . . . It goes down easy thanks to Whitehead’s superlative ability to weave deep research with rich narrative.”
—Defector

“Cool Machine is the latest in [Whitehead’s] staggeringly poignant oeuvre. New York City as it existed in the 1980s serves as the backdrop for this novel, and Whitehead masterfully leverages both its grit and glamour to stunning effect. You’ll follow businessman Ray Carney, his wife, Elizabeth, and a kingpin named Pepper across the city, the decade, and insurmountable change.”
—Harper's Bazaar

“A swaggering trip through early ’80s New York. In Cool Machine, furniture dealer Ray Carney—who secretly buys and flips stolen goods with expert finesse—is tempted into one last job when money tightens at home, while his lethal partner Pepper drifts into downtown art-club chaos. Add old ghosts, bigger risks, and a city turning glossy and ruthless, and you’ve got Whitehead at his best.”
—Oprah Daily