Cotton Comes to Harlem (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard)

A classic entry in Chester Himes's trailblazing Harlem Detectives series, Cotton Comes to Harlem is one of his hardest-hitting and most entertaining thrillers.

Flim-flam man Deke O'Hara is no sooner out of Atlanta's state penitentiary than he's back on the streets working the scam of a lifetime. As sponsor of the Back-to-Africa movement, he's counting on a big Harlem rally to produce a massive collection-for his own private charity. But the take is hijacked by white gunmen and hidden in a bale of cotton that suddenly everyone wants to get his hands on. As NYPD detectives "Coffin Ed" Johnson and "Grave Digger" Jones piece together the complexity of the scheme, we are treated to Himes's brand of hard-boiled crime fiction at its very best.