Matt Snediker’s Reviews > Crook Manifesto > Status Update

There is a character in this book, a singer named Roscoe Pope, who had a hit record on the radio called “Memo from Dr. Goodpussy”.

So things are going well.

The way Whitehead uses “they did a deal for”, across both books, in reference to furniture sales, jewelry fencing, rough-up jobs, missing person investigations, and murders, with the same deadpan tone, with the same matter-of-factness, daring you to have a problem with it, daring you to call him out on it, is just totally emblematic of what makes these books so good.

He’s a god of subtext.

This book, even moreso than HARLEM SHUFFLE, feels, in the best way possible, like your most charismatic, most off-holiday distant, most Stella Artois-appreciating of uncles unspooling a ream of family story negatives.