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. 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. 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) One of the things I didn't like was that the book does contain a fair bit of what I would consider to be unnecessary padding. Stuff that does nothing to set the scene or progress the narrative. Since finishing I have realised that this is not the end of the story - I believe it is part one of a trilogy - and I think that maybe the author wanted to end the story where her did and maybe needed an injection of word count to pad out this part? Speculation on my part, just my thoughts. Suffice to say, it could have been trimmed and would have lost nothing apart from having dragged in places. The writing is vibrant and rhythmic with the book difficult to put down to the point you find your eyes drooping yelling out for sleep. The power of Trade Unions, the police and the corruption therein, racism and the National Front are all explored throughout, but the book never weights heavy or gets too dramatic. There’s also the fun of real life musical figures littered throughout with Suzi’s boyfriend playing the role of fictional producer to many of them.

White Riot by Joe Thomas | Hachette UK

White Riot is an electrifying novel of politics, the counterculture, and music as a powerful force. In Suzi Scialfa, Thomas has given us a pioneering character - a female journalist, forging her way in a man's world; you believe in her, root for her, want to hear more. I loved this book." - Laura Barton The novel weaves fact and personal testimony into a fictional account of the period, focusing on a number of fictional characters from the worlds of music, politics and policing as they respond to real events. 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. R.F. Kuang, Sue Lynn Tan, Rebecca Ross, Kate Heartfield, N.E. Davenport, Saara El-Arifi, Juno Dawson and Sunyi DeanI’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. It’s written in an extremely unique voice - somewhat difficult at times , i did toy with not finishing it once or twice but I continued on to the end. 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. The plotting is tremendous and highly engaging, with a style somewhat reminiscent of David Peace’s Red Riding novels. The first in a proposed trilogy, which is a mouth watering prospect.

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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. A timely, powerful and gorgeously readable novel that represents everything that is good and important about the crime fiction genre’ Irish Times 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. A timely, powerful and gorgeously readable novel that represents everything that is good and important about the crime fiction genre' Irish TimesDeclan Burke is an author and journalist. His current novel is The Lammisters (No Alibis Press) Declan Burke If you're interested in the era and specifically the music, politics, corruption and racism, then don't hesitate. I can't wait to read the rest of the trilogy. This book started off well for me. I enjoyed the bit of a trip down memory lane that it took me on. Being a child of the 80s and interested in the politics of the era as I am.

White Riot | Joe Thomas | 9781529423372 | NetGalley White Riot | Joe Thomas | 9781529423372 | NetGalley

Gripping . . . Deeply moving . . . A love letter to London, seething with outrage, that leads you keen to read its planned sequels -- Mark Sanderson * The Times * Unfortunately the book feels like a generic police procedural, albeit with a sympathetic, left leaning political stance. None of the vitality or excitement of the music of the Punk era really imbues itself into the text, despite references to The Jam and other bands of the period. 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! 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”.

Death in Heels offers a fresh take on the traditional murder mystery. The drag queens bitchily refer to Fi as “Hagatha Christie” when she starts investigating Eve’s death. The novel is at its strongest when Murphy is exploring identities in flux, especially the contrasts between the drag queens’ public personas and their private selves (some of the queens, of course, can’t help but be fabulous in or out of costume). A dramatic gear-change near the end delivers a rather improbable Hollywood ending, but otherwise Death in Heels is a charming first offering in the “Dublin Drag Mystery Series”. 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 I learnt a lot reading this book, and feel that the author did a superb job of blending real life events/ history with his fictional storylines. All the characters in this novel are interesting and engaging and I really liked how we switch from one POV to another frequently (something I don’t usually like in a novel but that worked SO well for this story, trust me)! The prose style felt fresh and unique and the pacing was honestly phenomenal. I literally flew through this book, I could barely put it down. The first part of a proposed United Kingdom Trilogy, White Riot is a timely, powerful and gorgeously readable novel that represents everything that is good and important about the crime fiction genre.

Thomas • City, University of London Dr Joseph Thomas • City, University of London

A lesser writer might simply employ Falk’s outsider’s eye to see things that the locals have overlooked, or grown too familiar with to notice, but Exiles is a story rooted in many different kinds of relationships – those of lovers and married couples, and fathers and sons, and old friends and unexpected enemies – the exploration of which gradually teases out the truth of what happened to Kim Gillespie. Falk is, yet again, an understated, pragmatic and wholly believable guide as he weeds out decades of lies and half-truths from childhood friendships grown knotted and poisonous. This is the first in a trilogy and can't wait to read the next as the author is a talented storyteller.

Ultimately, White Riot creaks under the challenge of integrating fact and fiction. Perhaps it’s asking too much of the form, but for a crime novel that is also cast as a critique of the silencing of the lived experiences of those at the blunt and brutal end of police and racist violence, the characters of south Asian and Caribbean descent are thinly drawn.