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. 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

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

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. 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! 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.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 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”. 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. 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. 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

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

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 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. 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”. 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.This is the first in a trilogy and can't wait to read the next as the author is a talented storyteller. 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.

White Riot by Joe Thomas | Hachette UK White Riot by Joe Thomas | Hachette UK

R.F. Kuang, Sue Lynn Tan, Rebecca Ross, Kate Heartfield, N.E. Davenport, Saara El-Arifi, Juno Dawson and Sunyi DeanA timely, powerful and gorgeously readable novel that represents everything that is good and important about the crime fiction genre' Irish Times