Harlem Shuffle – Whitehead Colson (2022)

To his customers and neighbors on 125th Street, Carney is an upstanding salesman of reasonably priced furniture, building a life for himself and his family. He and his wife Elizabeth are expecting their second child, and although her parents on Striver’s Row do not approve of him or their cramped apartment across from the subway tracks, it is still home. Few people know that he descends from a line of uptown hoods and crooks, or that his facade of normalcy has more than a few cracks in it. Those cracks are growing larger all the time. Money is tight, especially with all those installment-plan sofas, so when his cousin Freddie occasionally drops off a ring or necklace at the furniture store, Ray sees no need to ask where it came from. He knows a discreet jeweler downtown who does not ask questions either. Then Freddie joins a crew planning to rob the Hotel Theresa, the “Waldorf of Harlem”, and volunteers Ray’s services as the fence. The heist does not go as planned; they rarely do. Now Ray must cater to a new clientele made up of crooked cops, vicious minions of the local crime lord and numerous other Harlem lowlifes. Thus begins the internal struggle between Ray the striver and Ray the crook. As he navigates this double life, he starts to see the truth about who really pulls the strings in Harlem. Can Ray avoid being killed, save his cousin and claim his share of the big score while maintaining his reputation as the go-to source for quality home furniture? This crime novel is driven by an ingeniously intricate plot set in a beautifully recreated Harlem of the early 1960s. It is a family saga masquerading as a crime novel, a hilarious morality play, a social novel about race and power, and ultimately a love letter to Harlem.