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

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The story is told from various POVs from DC Noble running “spycops”, undercover officers infiltrating organisations to the far right or left, Suzi, a photographer, Jon Davies, a solicitor for Hackney Council, Ayeleen, a young Turkish Muslim girl and up to Mrs. 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.

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

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.There are some moments where it seems to lag a bit and I've knocked it down to 4/5 stars purely for that. Set in Hackney, against a backdrop of immigration, activism and institutionalised racism, the novel begins with the death of Shahid Akhtar, whose drowning is designated death by misadventure by the police, even though it happens after closing time beside a pub with a strict “no Asians” policy.

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

The drag queens bitchily refer to Fi as “Hagatha Christie” when she starts investigating Eve’s death. Thomas has a lighter, more comic touch, however: determined to deliver truth to power even as he concedes that “no one gives a monkey’s”, DC Noble has a sense of twisted whimsy and gallows humour that leavens the grim litany of the era’s racist assaults and murders. Its a bit of a love letter to the east end of london, loads of long forgotten pubs are mentioned, lots of roads, and a lot of the characters have the surnames as current and former west ham players, and west ham loom large in the book too. A jaunty, knockabout, cops-and-robbers street vernacular sometimes jars with the reported words of real people, which are more in keeping with a serious social history book than a crime novel. Like David Peace and James Ellroy, Thomas fictionalises historical fact (among the many narrative voices here is that of Margaret Thatcher).For police officer Patrick 'Chance' Noble, the opportunity to look at organised violence, for photographer Suzi Scialfa, an opportunity to progress her career. We get to hear the perspectives of the police, activists, councillors, Margaret Thatcher, community leaders, and musicians - some fictional, some real, but all wholly convincing. This is Thatcher’s Britain now, a new world that Noble unwittingly helped to usher in, where racial tensions are weaponised by those in power. Suffice to say, it could have been trimmed and would have lost nothing apart from having dragged in places.

White Riot by Joe Thomas | Hachette UK

A lot of political background about Hackney in the late 70s but eventually the book settled down into an exciting thriller about racism and murder.

Exploring the tensions between the growing National Front movement and the local ethnic communities surrounding Brick Lane and the borough of Tower Hamlets. The book features many real-life people interspersed with the fictional, so we have Thatcher, Paul Weller, various politicians and also real-life events, including the death of Colin Roach from a gunshot wound in the entrance of Stoke Newington police station in 1983.

White Riot By Joe Thomas | New | 9781529423372 - Wob

This is a used book - there is no escaping the fact it has been read by someone else and it will show signs of wear and previous use.

Interesting how he weaves in real people - Thatcher, Paul Weller, various bands and politicians into the story . 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.