ONE OF THE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF THE SUMMER BY OPRAH DAILY, NEW YORK TIMES, WASHINGTON POST, TIME, NPR, LOS ANGELES TIMES, ESSENCE AND MORE
A BBC BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR PICK
'Whether in high literary form or entertaining, page-turner mode, the man is simply incapable of writing a bad book' IAN WILLIAMS, GUARDIAN
'A dazzling treatise . . . gleefully detonates its satire upon this world while getting to the heart of the place and its people' NEW YORK TIMES
'Crook Manifesto gave me something I had missed in recent reading: joy' TELEGRAPH
'A masterpiece' PEOPLE MAGAZINE
From two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author Colson Whitehead comes the thrilling and entertaining sequel to Harlem Shuffle
1971, New York City. Trash piles up on the streets, crime is at an all-time high, the city is going bankrupt, and a shooting war has broken out between the NYPD and the Black Liberation Army. Furniture store owner and ex-fence Ray Carney is trying to keep his head down, his business up and his life straight. But then he needs Jackson 5 tickets for his daughter May and he decides to hit up an old police contact, who wants favours in return. For Ray, staying out of the game gets a lot more complicated - and deadly.
1973. The old ways are being overthrown by the thriving counterculture, but Pepper, Carney's enduringly violent partner in crime, is a constant. In these difficult times, Pepper takes on a side gig doing security on a Blaxploitation shoot in Harlem, finding himself in a world of Hollywood stars and celebrity drug dealers, in addition to the usual cast of hustlers, mobsters and hit men. These adversaries underestimate the seasoned crook - to their regret.
1976. Harlem is burning, while the country gears up for the Bicentennial. Carney is trying to come up with a celebratory July 4th advertisement he can actually live with, while his wife Elizabeth is campaigning for her childhood friend, rising politician Alexander Oakes. When a fire seriously injures one of Carney's tenants, he enlists Pepper to look into who may be behind it, navigating a crumbling metropolis run by the shady, the violent and the utterly corrupt.
In scalpel-sharp prose and with unnerving clarity and wit, Colson Whitehead writes about a city that runs on cronyism, threats, ego, ambition, incompetence and even, sometimes, pride. Crook Manifesto is a kaleidoscopic portrait of Harlem, and a searching portrait of how families work in the face of chaos and hostility.
'Funny, effortlessly streetwise, and criminally pleasurable to read it's also politically enlightening and quietly incendiar
