Harlem Shuffle

Ray Carney sells furniture on 125th Street in Harlem, and by most accounts he is a respectable man. He moves sofas and dining sets on the installment plan, supports his wife Elizabeth, and is getting ready for their second child. Her parents on Striver's Row look down on him and on the cramped apartment near the elevated subway tracks, but it is his home, and he is working hard to keep it.

What his neighbors mostly don't know is that Ray comes from a family of uptown crooks. Money is tight, so when his cousin Freddie turns up now and then with a ring or a necklace, Ray takes it without asking questions and passes it to a downtown jeweler who doesn't ask any either. It is a small compromise, and it keeps growing.

Then Freddie joins a crew planning to rob the Hotel Theresa, one of Harlem's best-known landmarks, and puts Ray forward as the man who will fence the loot. The job goes wrong, and Ray ends up dealing with dirty cops, dangerous local gangsters, small-time pornographers and other Harlem operators he never wanted as customers. The more he is pulled into that world, the more he sees who really holds power in the neighborhood. He must stay alive, protect Freddie, claim his cut, and keep his furniture business looking spotless.

Colson Whitehead, author of The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys, sets this comic crime story in Harlem in the early 1960s. Beneath the heist plot it is a family story and a sharp look at race, ambition and power, told with a lot of affection for the neighborhood.