"It was a glorious June morning,” Colson Whitehead writes in Crook Manifesto. “The sun was shining, the birds were singing, the ambulances were screaming, and the daylight falling on last night’s crime scenes made the blood twinkle like dew in a green heaven.”
Welcome back to the Technicolor world of Ray Carney: furniture salesman, family man, and sometimes-criminal. Last seen in Harlem Shuffle, Carney returns for another bruising round of moral misadventures in Crook Manifesto, the second installment in Whitehead’s planned three-volume series. Crook Manifesto finds Carney upwardly mobile and back on the straight and narrow, but all it takes to pull him back into Harlem’s criminal underbelly is one tortured trade: to score his daughter tickets to The Jackson 5’s sold-out show at Madison Square Garden, he dips back into the jewel fencing game one last time. But of course, there’s no “one last time” for men like Carney, who reflects, “Crooked stays crooked and bent hates straight. The rest is survival.” Soon enough, Carney becomes an unwilling accomplice to a corrupt detective on a long, dark night of the soul, pressed into service as a henchman throughout a nightmarish carousel of shoot-outs and stick-ups. The consequences of that brutal night ricochet across Carney’s life, dragging him ever further down into the morass of danger, dirty deals, and double lives he’s fought so hard to escape.
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