"This was America, melting pot and powder keg," says a character in Crook Manifesto, Colson Whitehead's energetic and impeccably hardboiled sequel to 2021's Harlem Shuffle. The first novel took place mostly in the 1960s. In this work, which also blends crime elements with explorations of family dynamics, it's the 1970s, and many of the characters return, including former stolen-goods fence and current furniture salesman Ray Carney and his wife, Elizabeth, as well as a colorful assortment of family members and crime-ring accomplices.
The book is three interlocking novellas. In the first, Carney tries to score Jackson 5 tickets for his daughter from corrupt cop Munson, but in order to get them, Munson forces him to participate in a scheme involving a case of stolen diamonds. The second, set two years later, involves a film director, dressed "in snakeskin pants and megawatt yellow blouse," determined to make a Blaxploitation film, and the "freelance muscle" he hires for security and, later, to find their missing leading lady. The last part, set during America's bicentennial, is the story of a former district attorney running for Manhattan borough president, a suspicious fire above Carney's store that burns an 11-year-old tenant, and the possible connection between them. Backstories sometimes weigh the novel down, but Whitehead (The Nickel Boys; The Underground Railroad; Zone One) expertly re-creates the era, with particularly entertaining details about the film. And his humor is as sharp as ever, as when he writes that the bicentennial hoopla "was driving Carney batty. It was inescapable, like a dome of red, white, and blue smog." --Michael Magras, freelance book reviewer