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Books

The gangs of LA are caught in an unending bloody vendetta

All Involved, Ryan Gattis’s buzzing thriller about riots and racial tension in 1992, might just as well have been set yesterday

1 August 2015

9:00 AM

1 August 2015

9:00 AM

All Involved Ryan Gattis

Picador, pp.384, £12.99, ISBN: 9781447283164

Ryan Gattis’s novel All Involved is set in South Central Los Angeles in 1992, during the riots that began after four white police officers were acquitted of beating the black taxi-driver Rodney King. The inadvertent coup that the book’s publishers have scored by bringing it out in the wake of the Baltimore and Ferguson riots only underlines how far we haven’t come since then: some lines from this buzzing thriller might still be quotes from yesterday’s news stories, such as the impassioned complaint of one character against the police: ‘If you’re brown or black, you’re worth nothing.

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