the debut novel from Irish author Kitty Murphy, is set in the fabulous world of Dublin’s drag scene.

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

Fi McKinnery is delighted when her best friend, Mae B, takes to the stage at TRASH for the first time, only for her big moment to be upstaged by the jealous, self-absorbed Eve, who parodies Mae B’s performance. 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). For anyone who lived in London at that time, much will be familiar, including the then – as now – polarised political landscape.

Unfortunately the book feels like a generic police procedural, albeit with a sympathetic, left leaning political stance. Accounts of town hall discussions about, for instance, defunding the police, land heavily on the page. Centred around the deaths of Altab Ali in 1978 and Colin Roach, this is a narrative tour-de-force, encompassing the anti-Nazi resistance of Rock Against Racism, police corruption (and institutional racism), and the rise of Margaret Thatcher.

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

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. 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. Had the book been set about 18 months earlier the aspect of the National Front would have been greater. Here is a quick description and cover image of book White Riot written by Joe Thomas which was published in January 19, 2023. Supercharged by the music and counterculture of the era, White Riot weaves fiction, fact and personal experience to record the radical tale of London’s most thrilling borough.

He is assigned to the Met Race Crime Initiative and inserts undercover cops into the National Front and a loose coalition of anti-Fascist groups. Perhaps that is why the second history period in the book focused on where it had not been adequately tackled - within the police.

White Riot by Joe Thomas review – racial tensions in Thatcher

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. 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. The second part takes place in 1983, in the aftermath of the death of Colin Roach inside Stoke Newington police station. 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”. There she uncovers what appears to be “a porno self-help book” in Viviana’s belongings but which she later realises is a diary.He utilises true crimes – the death of Colin Roach in 1983, for example, who according to the police walked into Stoke Newington nick to take his own life – to explore the extent to which the authorities weren’t simply colluding with right-wing racists but creating the conditions in which racism could flourish. 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. 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. 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.