The System
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
Longlisted for the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger 2021
‘Excellent, lucid, intelligent and gripping’ – Scotsman
‘An utterly riveting read’ – Guardian, Thriller of the Month
6 December 1993. A drug dealer called Scrappy is shot and left for dead on her mother’s lawn in South Central Los Angeles. Two local gang members, Wizard and Dreamer, are arrested. The problem is: one is guilty, the other wasn’t even there. It had to be a frame-up. And the cops had to be responsible, didn’t they?
Narrated by the characters involved – the suspects, the victim, the families who love them, and those simply doing their jobs – The System tells the story of one crime, from the moments before shots are fired to the verdict and its violent aftershocks. It’s a breakneck journey through the American criminal justice system. A system that can save you, or break you.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
On the night of Dec. 6, 1993, heroin addict Augie Clark, a key player in this ambitious crime novel set in L.A. from Gattis (Safe), witnesses his dealer, Scrappy, getting shot outside her mother's house, and recognizes the shooter as gangbanger Wizard, but doesn't know who the guy with Wizard is. Clark saves Scrappy's life with some quick first aid, calls an ambulance and pockets the gun used in the shooting left at the scene. The next day, Clark's parole officer finds the gun during a routine check on Clark, and blackmails him to finger Wizard and Wizard's usual accomplice, Dreamer, who has no felony record. The long, torturous road to trial offers a devastating portrait of the criminal network operating from jails, and shows how a person like Dreamer, the book's only sympathetic character, has little hope of justice. At times, this reads like a legal thriller, but with a lot more grit and sharper than usual characterization. Gattis expands the story dramatically through multiple first-person monologues from those on both sides of the criminal justice system. Too often, though, the monologues self-consciously strive for profundity in hard-to-swallow ways. Still, this is a story with great resonance for today.
