NAMED A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK BY The New York Times, The New Yorker, Boston Globe, 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
“Whitehead’s justly celebrated Harlem Trilogy comes to a triumphant, satisfying conclusion. . . . [Packs] three page-turning thrillers into one book that’s sustained throughout by rich, engaging characterizations and lucid, provocative reflections on a community, a city, and a people which it presents as both exasperating and captivating with equal intensity. A master novelist in full command of his powers as a storyteller, prose stylist, and social observer.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Electrifying. . . . A glorious fusion of crime, rebel creativity, and metaphysics. . . . Every page is incandescent with longing, doubts, calculations, and determination as Whitehead’s magnetic characters are pushed to the limits and the city roils. Whitehead gets every gritty, absurd, tender detail just right as he maps the eighties zeitgeist and its foreshadowing of our own, revealing an immense web of malfeasance. This is a masterwork of crime fiction infused with labyrinthine suspense; brilliant, witty, and dynamic social insights; and profound questions of survival.”
—Booklist (starred review)
“Whitehead concludes his Harlem Trilogy with a transcendent and wildly entertaining novel in which his recurring characters grapple with the ways their lives are defined by crime and the city they call home. . . . The heists, stakeouts, and showdowns are rendered with grit and precision, but the real wallops come in breathtaking riffs on the city’s magnetic force. . . . It’s the greatest New York novel in years.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Like a criminal landing the ultimate score, Colson Whitehead rounds out his Harlem Trilogy with another urban masterpiece.”
—BookPage (starred review)
“Colson Whitehead is the best there is, period.”
—Ann Patchett
