From #1New York Timesbestselling 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 Furnitures Dealer of the Month. When the banks wont 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, Carneys friend and partner in crime, Pepper, is a stone-cold sociopath. To others, a top thief with questionable people skills. Either way, hes feeling his age in his troubled gut and his aching bones. When he takes on a bodyguard gig as a favor to Elizabeth, hes plunged into the alien territory of the East Village art and club scene. Luckily for him, whether youre uptown or down, everyone speaks the same language of violencePepper is a native speaker.

1986. Carney has always been haunted by his inability to save his cousin Freddie. Now, twenty years after Freddies death, he has a chance to rescue Freddies 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 hes 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 Machineroves all over the city, from Windows on the World to the Meadowlands, to show that in New York, and in the lives of Whiteheads vivid characters, its whats below the surface that reveals the truth.