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

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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 by Joe Thomas | Goodreads

A timely, powerful and gorgeously readable novel that represents everything that is good and important about the crime fiction genre’ Irish Times 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. 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.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. 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. 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.

White Riot: The Sunday Times Thriller of the Month : Thomas White Riot: The Sunday Times Thriller of the Month : Thomas

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. 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.

Customer reviews

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. 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. Brilliant' The Times Mario Leme is a low-ranking detective in the Sao Paulo civil police. Every day on the way to work he sets off…