Ray Carney is a furniture salesman in Harlem, looking to provide for his family and move to a nicer neighbourhood, and sometimes crossing the line into criminal dealings. He falls in deeper than expected when his cousin Freddie names him as the fence in a major jewellery heist. He isn’t fighting for social justice, and spends more time pondering new lines of sofa or dining table than how to improve race relations.

He experiences racism as a black business owner, but it’s relentless and subtle, not unusual or overt. The white furniture sales rep who won’t sell to him; the in-laws who look down on him for being darker-skinned than their daughter; the white patriarch who won’t even acknowledge the black person in his house. There is no hero’s journey or great social change; this is just what it was like to be a black man in 1960s New York.

I didn’t enjoy it as much as The Underground Railroad, but it’s still a fun crime novel.

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