Description
From the #1 New York Times bestselling author and two-time Pulitzer Prize
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 Sugar Hill, 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.
