The Riot
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
"A crime narrative of great authority . . . extremely evocative" from the award-winning author of A Willing Victim (Financial Times).
This is the fifth volume in the award-winning Inspector Ted Stratton series, which opened during the London Blitz (with The Innocent Spy) and has now landed in the rainy summer of 1958. Detective Inspector Stratton is investigating the death of a rent collector—never a popular personage—in Notting Hill, a district seething with tensions between the new Caribbean immigrants and their white, working-class neighbors. Stratton has his suspicions, but a second body makes it clear: Race is at the heart of these murders. Like the rest of the series, The Riot is based on real events and characters, on which Wilson sheds new and revealing light. A compelling mystery and a fascinating dive into the London of the late 1950s, complete with cameo appearances by a few notorious celebrities.
Praise for the Inspector Stratton series
"Laura Wilson is an exceptional talent . . . A terrific police procedural, a mesmerizing historical novel—few writers working today can deliver this kind one-two punch." —Laura Lippman, New York Times bestselling author
"Outstanding . . . Wilson convincingly evokes what it was like to sleep in a bomb shelter or stumble through shattered London streets in the dark. The characters are convincing, too." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Wilson is as adroit at the straightforward mechanics of the crime mystery as she is at evocative prose shot through with a keen sense of the past." —Independent
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Wilson's somewhat convoluted fifth mystery featuring Det. Insp. Ted Stratton (after 2015's A Willing Victim) takes Stratton in 1958 to Notting Hill, an area of London much more rough-and-tumble than his last assignment. When a rent collector is murdered, the higher-ups want to deny that the killing was racially motivated, but another murder soon makes it impossible to ignore that the racial tensions between working-class white people and Caribbean immigrants are finally boiling over. While Stratton investigates the murders and tries to determine whether there's a connection, a race riot breaks out in the neighborhood, and yet another murder is uncovered. Stratton must sift through the complicated world of building societies (financial institutions owned by its members that offer banking and related financial services), as well as the motivations of a social-climbing landlord and a cast of pimps, prostitutes, and do-gooder socialites, to get to the truth. Wilson introduces too many characters and names too quickly, making the threads of the intersecting cases difficult to follow, but she illuminates the period beautifully with her details of the historically based events.
