White Riot: The Sunday Times Thriller of the Month (United Kingdom Trilogy)

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I’m glad I did read the way through. It’s frightening to see how far we have not come. How little has really changed and how still the government is essentially the same no matter who’s at the head of it. The novel segues into an extended character study of Viviana, “a mixed-race woman who doesn’t bow her head in submission”, as de Campos explores Brazilian attitudes to race, class, prostitution and women. It’s a classic bait-and-switch: having lured us into the story with a conventional tale of a reluctant amateur sleuth, de Campos delivers a polemic against patriarchal privilege that somehow believes, despite perpetrating “crimes of kidnap, assault, false imprisonment, attempted femicide and some others”, that it is still entitled to justice. Police and thieves, punks and spycops. White Riot captures the raw energy of the times in spectacular fashion, evoking a visceral narrative of power and corruption -- Jake Arnott It covers a lot of hard hitting subjects and it does this very well. No over the top sensationalising, well, to be honest, it was brutal enough without!

Arcadia snaps up ‘supercharged’ London crime trilogy by Thomas

One of the things I did like about the book was the way that the author managed to weave fiction into fact almost seamlessly. The story the book is telling is set firmly within the era and all that happened therein. A lot of the characters are real people and have been portrayed, to the best of my knowledge, with good accuracy. The political landscape has also been (again to my knowledge and experience) faithfully presented, in all its brutal reality. Warts and all.

Hotjar sets this cookie to identify a new user’s first session. It stores a true/false value, indicating whether it was the first time Hotjar saw this user. Thomas’s fiction draws on archive material, testimonies and newspaper reports from 1978-83, in particular the events surrounding the unsolved killings of two men of colour in east London. Through the stories of Altab Ali, who was stabbed to death in Whitechapel, and Colin Roach, who allegedly shot himself in Stoke Newington police station, White Riot unfolds as a propulsive crime novel. Thomas ably captures local community anger, interracial tensions and especially the foreboding atmosphere around anti-fascist marches that led to violent clashes with NF skinheads and thuggish Special Patrol Group police. In the melee, there’s the “thump of bats on slabs of meat, the crunch of deadened limb, of nose and cheek, and broken glass”.

White Riot: The Sunday Times Thriller of the Month (United White Riot: The Sunday Times Thriller of the Month (United

The story itself is decent enough and was made interesting for me because it covers history that I lived through. The book is the first of a trilogy. I suspect that, if the non-sentences and trip details were removed, the trilogy would make one good book. In 1983 Noble is sent to Stoke Newington where a young man has died in suspicious circumstances and he is tasked with investigating the death. One of the main things I will take from reading this book, and this is why I think it will do well and become an important read, is that comparing the 70s and 80s with the now, it appears that not much has really changed, and that's very sad. This is the first in a trilogy and can't wait to read the next as the author is a talented storyteller.

A timely, powerful and gorgeously readable novel that represents everything that is good and important about the crime fiction genre' Irish Times A timely, powerful and gorgeously readable novel that represents everything that is good and important about the crime fiction genre’ Irish Times MyHome.ie (Opens in new window) • Top 1000 • The Gloss (Opens in new window) • Recruit Ireland (Opens in new window) • Irish Times Training (Opens in new window)