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. Killing you is like taking out the trash. That’s how they think.’
Judging by damage caused, Gattis writes, the 1992 riots were ‘the greatest civic disturbance in the history of the United States’. In six days, at least 60 people were killed, more than 2,000 were injured, upwards of a billion dollars’ worth of property was damaged and some 40,000 people were deprived of their livelihoods because of arson or fire damage.
This is the backdrop against which All Involved unfolds, but the novel isn’t quite the socio-political panoply that its title, which plays on a gang phrase for being connected with organised crime, seems to suggest.
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