After seeing some of the less than glowing reviews of Harlem Shuffle I was a little wary of picking it up, but I found this to be such an enjoyable read. Ray Carney is a furniture salesman and occasional middleman for crooks but ultimately just wants to provide a good life for his wife and family, and prove himself to his snooty in-laws, who see him as the wrong kind of man for their daughter. When his cousin Freddie gets involved in a break-in and shares his name with the mobster who ran the job, Ray is thrown closer into the underbelly of Harlem.

I just really sank into this - Whitehead's writing is just first class and I found Ray to be a protagonist I liked spending time with. All of the characters in these pages felt well developed, and largely avoided being stereotypes of their employment or character. There were times when the novel felt a little long-winded, but I generally let myself go on the journey. It is not a fast-paced thriller that you may expect seeing the word 'heist' but there are certainly action scenes within the pages of this novel; many of which were almost cinematic in their writing.

Harlem in the 1960s is also not a place or a time that I know a lot about, so I loved Whitehead's love letter to the area, romanticising it in some ways but always undercutting it with realism about what it meant to live in this area of the city and this time. There are references to real world events, but these never feel heavy handed or pointed within the text.

I really liked this one and will be picking up the rest of the trilogy.