In Cool Machine: A Novel, the final volume of Colson Whitehead’s Harlem Trilogy, 1980s New York emerges from financial ruin and decline, energized by rampant real estate development and a Wall Street unchained by Reagan-era predatory capitalism. Amid the roiling transformation, successful business owner and master fence Ray Carney gambles on one last heist, entangling him with a legendary criminal mastermind. His friend and partner in crime, Pepper, takes a bodyguarding gig that plunges him into the alien territory of the East Village art and club scenes, where he discovers brutality is a universal language. And as the decade moves closer to its end, Carney comes out of retirement to rescue his cousin’s son from the city’s violent forces, risking the safety he’s spent years building for his family. Traversing Harlem to the Meadowlands, Whitehead paints a portrait of a city in transition, revealing what lies beneath its shimmering surface.

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COLSON WHITEHEAD is the No. 1 New York Times bestselling author of 12 works of fiction and nonfiction. He is a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner for The Nickel Boys: A Novel and The Underground Railroad: A Novel, which also won the National Book Award, and a recipient of MacArthur and Guggenheim fellowships. Cool Machine: A Novel (Doubleday) is his latest book. He lives in New York.