Plan B is the ninth and final work in Chester Himes's "Harlem Cycle", a series that focuses on the investigations of Himes's protagonists Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson. Digger and Ed are two black detectives in a predominantly white police force, who work in the black neighborhood of Harlem. In the novels, they struggle to achieve some measure of justice, both inside and outside of the law, for the poor black residents of Harlem, who seldom receive a parity of treatment under a racist law enforced by a corrupt police force. In Plan B, however, Himes details the failure of his heroic pair of detectives, who struggle from the beginning to right what is presented as a hopeless situation. The work ends with the deaths of both detectives, who have failed to save Harlem, and America as a whole, from a race war between...