Joe Thomas on writing about one's past within Red Menace

I was born in Hackney in 1977 and for 25 years I wanted to leave. Now, it’s an aspirational address, gentrified and expensive. I was born in Hackney Mothers’ Hospital on Lower Clapton Road which was later to become known as ‘Murder Mile’. I lived on Mildenhall Road, just down from Clapton Pond. I wrote White Riot to try and better understand the Hackney I grew up in, the time and place, and how the borough, it seems to me, is something of a lightning rod for the political and social currents of the country. I wrote Red Menace to extend the geographical focus, to widen it to other areas of east and north London.

Red Menace is a historical, social crime novel about police corruption, institutional racism, the devastating effects of Thatcherism, and the counter-cultural movement of the ‘80’s. The novel takes in Live Aid, the Broadwater Farm uprising, the Wapping Dispute and, like White Riot, is rooted in the Hackney experience of the 1980s. Mark Sanderson, writing in the Times, called White Riot, ‘a love letter to London, seething with outrage’. In Red Menace, the love is still there, but I think the outrage is intensified.

I remember the Hackney Show on Hackney Downs, the Labour Club in Dalston, steel bands and heavy reggae, kids in I Love ILEA and GLC t-shirts, Granny’s takeaway and Chimes nightclub, where, for a period, serious violence was a regular occurrence. 

In the novel, I write about the Hackney Show of 1986, one I went to, and the fictionalising of it is an insight into how I accessed sensual memories, sights and sounds, smells and tastes to try to recreate – and reimagine, resurrect – Hackney in the 1980s.

Here’s an edited extract from the novel that I think is instructive:

Over the weekend, the football season safely finished for another year, there’d been the festival up on Hackney Downs, the Hackney Show. Fairground games and food, Jean Breeze and Dennis Bovell, the London All Stars Steels and the Perpetual Beauty Carnival Club, stunts, stalls and side shows –

Across the park, on the north side, a little bit away from the festivities, a tent emitting pounding reggae, pulsating dub.

He and the boy had wandered over towards it, the towers of the Nightingale Estate to their right, Hackney Downs School to their left –

The tent shook with the soundsystem, the sides flapping, the roof lifting and falling, one or two men dancing on their own just outside it, shirts off and bare feet, eyes red, eyes wild –

Jon felt the bass tearing through him. The boy slowed down a touch as they approached.

Jon shook his head and put a hand on his shoulder. The boy close, like when he was a shy toddler, wrapping himself around Jon’s leg, pouting.

The volume and depth of the music made the lights shake and flash.

Air thick with smoke –

Jon seeing the boy’s eyes start to water, not a great deal else.

They stayed about fifteen minutes, Jon recognising a Steel Pulse track that had been stripped right down and then powered right up, an MC over the top of it, that was enough.

On the way out, one of the Rastas winked at the boy, grinned.

‘Welcome to Jamaica,’ he said.

All of this is true, all of this happened, but how much more is there that I can’t remember? 

Writing about your own past in the context of a transparently political novel, a novel unashamedly interrogating society, does something to your own history; if you can get that right, then it’s a good start.

Red Menace by Joe Thomas (Quercus) Out Now

Live Aid, July 1985. The great and the good of the music scene converge to save the world. But the TV glitz cannot disguise ugly truths about Thatcher's Britain. Jon Davies and Suzi Scialfa have moved on since the inquest into the death of Colin Roach, but they're about to be drawn back into the struggle - Jon by his restless curiosity and Suzi by the reappearance of DC Patrick Noble. Noble's other asset, the salaried spycop Parker, is a pawn in a game he only dimly comprehends. First, he's ordered to infiltrate the Broadwater Farm Estate in Tottenham; next will come Wapping, ground zero of a plot to smash the print unions. But who is Noble working for, and how far can he be trusted? The Iron Lady is reforging the nation, and London with it. Right to Buy may secure her votes, but who really stands to benefit? Corruption is endemic and the gap between rich and poor grows wider by the day. Insurrection seems imminent - all that's needed is a spark.

Forthcoming Books from Quercus Books (Incl Riverrun and MacLehose Press

January 2024

A long, hot summer in Wiltshire is broken by a sudden downpour. Flash floods bring something sinister to the surface - a human skeleton. When forensic testing matches the bones to a man named Lee Geary, reported missing nine years earlier, the case is passed to DI Matt Lockyer. Geary was a known drug user, so it could be a simple case of misadventure, but Lockyer isn't so sure. Geary was a townie, and had learning disabilities, so what was he doing out on the Plain all alone? Lockyer soon learns that the year he disappeared, Geary was questioned in relation to another crime - the murder of a young woman named Holly Gilbert. With the help of DC Gemma Broad, Lockyer begins to dig deeper, and discovers that two other persons of interest in the Holly Gilbert case have also either died or disappeared in the intervening years. A coincidence? Or a string of murders that has gone undetected for nearly a decade...? Laying out the Bones is by Kate Webb.

The Last Word is by Elly Griffiths. Natalka and Edwin, whom we met in The Postscript Murders, are running a detective agency in Shoreham, Sussex. Despite a steady stream of minor cases, Natalka is frustrated, longing for a big juicy case such as murder to come the agency's way. Natalka is now living with dreamer, Benedict. But her Ukrainian mother Valentyna has joined them from her war-torn country and three's a crowd. It's annoying to have Valentyna in the tiny flat, cooking borscht and cleaning things that are already clean. To add to Natalka's irritation,Benedict and her mother get on brilliantly. Then a murder case turns up. Local writer, Melody Chambers, is found dead and her family are convinced it is murder. Edwin, a big fan of the obit pages, thinks there's a link to the writer of Melody's obituary who pre-deceased his subject. The trail leads Benedict and Edwin to a slightly sinister writers' retreat. When another writer is found dead, Edwin thinks that the clue lies in the words. Seeking professional help, the amateur investigators turn to their friend, detective Harbinder Kaur, to find that they have stumbled on a plot that is stranger than fiction.

Oxford, city of rich and poor, where the homeless camp out in the shadows of the gorgeous buildings and monuments. A city of lost things - and buried crimes.  At three o'clock in the morning, Emergency Services receives a call. 'This is Zara Fanshawe. Always lost and never found.' An hour later, the wayward celebrity's Rolls Royce Phantom is found abandoned in dingy Becket Street. The paparazzi go wild.  For some reason, news of Zara's disappearance prompts homeless woman Lena Wójcik to search the camps, nervously, for the bad-tempered vagrant known as 'Waitrose', a familiar sight in Oxford pushing his trolley of possessions. But he's nowhere to be found either.  Who will lead the investigation and cope with the media frenzy? Suave, prize-winning, Oxford-educated DI Ray Wilkins is passed over in favour of his partner, gobby, trailer-park educated DI Ryan Wilkins (no relation). You wouldn't think Ray would be happy. He isn't. You wouldn't think Ryan would be any good at national press presentations. He isn't. And when legendary cop Chester Lynch takes a shine to Ray - and takes against Ryan - things are only going to get even messier. Lost and Never Found is by Simon Mason.

Farewell Dinner for a Spy is by Edward Wilson. 1949: William Catesby returns to London in disgrace, accused of murdering a 'double-dipper' the Americans believed to be one of their own. His left-wing sympathies have him singled out as a traitor. Henry Bone throws him a lifeline, sending him to Marseille, ostensibly to report on dockers' strikes and keep tabs on the errant wife of a British diplomat. But there's a catch. For his cover story, he's demobbed from the service and tricked out as a writer researching a book on the Resistance. In Marseille, Catesby is caught in a deadly vice between the CIA and the mafia, who are colluding to fuel the war in Indochina. Swept eastwards to Laos himself, he remains uncertain of the true purpose behind his mission, though he has his suspicions: Bone has murder on his mind, and the target is a former comrade from Catesby's SOE days. The question is, which one.

February 2024

Last Seen is by Anna Smith. Life has changed for Private Investigator Billie Carlson. After years of chasing down every lead possible, she's finally found her son, Lucas, and brought him safely home to Glasgow. One afternoon, Billie gets a call from an unknown number. The man on the end of the phone refuses to tell her his name, but he explains that his brother, Omar, is being held in prison after stabbing two men outside a block of flats. He wants Billie to investigate what happened that night and find out any information that might help Omar. Reluctantly, Billie takes on the case. But as she starts to untangle what happened that night, she can't shake the feeling that she's being watched. With Lucas depending on her, Billie is determined to avoid any dangerous encounters. But trouble seems to have a way of tracking her down....

Some people think foxes go around collecting qi, or life force, but nothing could be further than the truth. We are living creatures, just like you, only usually better looking. Manchuria, 1908: A young woman is found frozen in the snow. Her death is clouded by rumours of foxes, believed to lure people into peril by transforming into beautiful women and men. Bao, a detective with a reputation for sniffing out the truth, is hired to uncover the dead woman's identity. Since childhood, Bao has been intrigued by the fox gods, yet they've remained tantalizingly out of reach. Until, perhaps, now. Snow is a creature of many secrets, but most of all, she's a mother seeking vengeance. Hunting a murderer, the trail will take her from northern China to Japan, with Bao following doggedly behind. And as their paths draw ever closer together, both Snow and Bao will encounter old friends and new foes, even as more deaths occur.  The Fox Wife is by Yangsze Choo.

The Winter Visitor is by James Henry. Essex, February, 1991. The weather is biting cold. Everyone would rather be somewhere warmer, which is why it's a big surprise when a wanted drug smuggler, Bruce Hopkins, risks a return to his old haunts in Colchester after a decade long exile on the Costa del Sol. Lured back by a letter from the wife Hopkins left behind, no one is more surprised than him when he finds himself abducted and stripped bare only to be sent to a watery grave in the boot of a stolen Ford Sierra. The police wonder if it could be retaliation from a Spanish gang, sending a warning to their English counterparts? DS Daniel Kenton is teamed up with the unorthodox DS Brazier to investigate a crime wave which takes in not only the murder of an expat dope smuggler, but a sophisticated arson attack on a Norman church and the unexpected suicide of an ageing florist. Could there possibly be a thread that connects them?

Red Menace is by Joe Thomas. Live Aid, July 1985. The great and the good of the music scene converge to save the world. But the TV glitz cannot disguise ugly truths about Thatcher's Britain. Jon Davies and Suzi Scialfa have moved on since the inquest into the death of Colin Roach, but they're about to be drawn back into the struggle - Jon by his restless curiosity and Suzi by the reappearance of DC Patrick Noble. Noble's other asset, the salaried spycop Parker, is a pawn in a game he only dimly comprehends. First, he's ordered to infiltrate the Broadwater Farm Estate in Tottenham; next will come Wapping, ground zero of a plot to smash the print unions. But who is Noble working for, and how far can he be trusted? The Iron Lady is reforging the nation, and London with it. Right to Buy may secure her votes, but who really stands to benefit? Corruption is endemic and the gap between rich and poor grows wider by the day. Insurrection seems imminent - all that's needed is a spark.

March 2024

How to Solve Your Own Murder is by Kristen Perrin. Frances always said she'd be murdered... She was right. In 1965, seventeen-year-old Frances Adams was told by a fortune teller that one day she'd be murdered. Frances spent the next sixty years trying to prevent the crime that would be her eventual demise. Of course, no one took her seriously - until she was dead. For Frances, being the village busybody was a form of insurance. She'd spent a lifetime compiling dirt on every person she met, just in case they might turn out to be her killer. In the heart of her sprawling country estate lies an eccentric library of detective work, where the right person could step in and use her findings to solve her murder. When her great-niece Annie arrives from London and discovers that Frances' worst fear has come true, Annie is thrust into her great-aunt's last act of revenge against her sceptical friends and family. Frances' will stipulates that the person who solves her murder will inherit her millions. Can Annie unravel the mystery and find justice for Frances, or will digging up the past lead her into the path of the killer?

The Silver Bone is by Andrey Kurkov. Kyiv, 1919. The Soviets control the city, but White armies menace them from the West. No man trusts his neighbour and any spark of resistance may ignite into open rebellion. When Samson Kolechko's father is murdered, his last act is to save his son from a falling Cossack sabre. Deprived of his right ear instead of his head, Samson is left an orphan, with only his father's collection of abacuses for company. Until, that is, his flat is requisitioned by two Red Army soldiers, whose secret plans Samson is somehow able to overhear with uncanny clarity. Eager to thwart them, he stumbles into a world of murder and intrigue that will either be the making of him - or finish what the Cossack started. Inflected with Kurkov's signature humour and magical realism, The Silver Bone takes inspiration from the real life archives of crime enforcement agencies in Kyiv, crafting a propulsive narrative that bursts to life with rich historical detail.

April 2024

Her Last Summer is by Emily Freud. No body. No crime? Twenty years ago, Mari vanished while backpacking through Thailand with her boyfriend, Luke. He was accused of murder, but has always insisted he's innocent. Besides, her body was never found. Now, he's finally ready to talk. And filmmaker Cassidy Chambers wants to be the one to uncover what really happened, back then, in the dark of the jungle. But as she delves deeper into the past, Cassidy begins to fear what lies ahead, and the secrets buried along the way.

May 2024

The Wild Swimmers is by William Shaw. The body of a local woman is found washed up on the Folkstone shoreline. Cupidi must find the missing link between a group of wild swimmers, an online dating profile and a slippery killer who feels remarkably close to home. In the latest instalment of the D S Cupidi series low tide reveals a mysterious crime.

Between Two Worlds is by Olivier Norek. Undercover police officer Adam Sirkis needs to flee Syria. He knows it's a risk and he's ready for it. First, he sends his wife and daughter to Libya, where they will find boat heading for the Italian coast. Meanwhile, Adam himself winds up in France in the

Calais Jungle, the infamous camp for migrants awaiting passage to the UK. Bastien Miller, a police lieutenant freshly transferred to the Calais police force, arrives at about the same time as Adam. His wife is depressed and his teenage daughter isn't exactly happy with the move. When a murder occurs in the Jungle, Adam and Bastien team up to get to the bottom of it. Between Two Worlds is one of these vital books that illuminate an impossible political and humanitarian situation without sugar-coating it in any way.

June 2024

The Man in Black and Other Stories is by Elly Griffiths. Here are bite-sized tales to please and entertain every thriller taste as well as all Elly Griffiths' fans. There are ghost stories and mini cosy mysteries; tales of psychological suspense and poignant vignettes of love and loss. There's a creepy horror story to make you shiver and a tale narrated by Flint, Ruth Galloway's cat, to make you smile. These stories illustrate the breadth and variety of Elly Griffiths' talent. Even the darkest of them is leavened with light touches of humour. 

The long arm of history reaches into the present in Bruno's latest case when three sets of bones are discovered, buried deep in the woods outside the Dordogne town of St Denis. It appears that the remains have lain there since World War 2. Bruno must investigate who the bones belong to and whether their burial amounts to a war crime. Bruno has other concerns too. After weeks of heavy autumn rain, the normally tranquil Dordogne river has risen to record levels, compromising the upriver dams that control the Vezere that flows through St Denis, bringing the threat of a devastating flood. As ever, Bruno must rely on his wits, tenacity and people skills to ensure that past wrongs don't result in present violence, and to keep his little town and its inhabitants safe from harm. A Grave in the Woods is by Martin Walker. 

The Trial is by Jo Spain. 2014, Dublin: at St Edmunds, an elite college on the outskirts of the city, twenty-year-old medical student Theo gets up one morning, leaving behind his sleeping girlfriend, Dani, and his studies - never to be seen again. With too many unanswered questions, Dani simply can't accept Theo's disappearance and reports him missing, even though no one else seems concerned, including Theo's father. Ten years later, Dani returns to the college as a history professor. With her mother suffering from severe dementia, and her past at St Edmunds still haunting her, she's trying for a new start. But not all is as it seems behind the cloistered college walls - meanwhile, Dani is hiding secrets of her own.

The White Circle is by Oliver Bottini and is the final book in the Black Forest Investigations series. Louise Bonì, Chief Inspector of the Freiburg criminal police, gets intelligence from an informer that two guns have been bought from a Russian criminal network. Desperate to prevent a fatal act of violence, Bonì is swift to investigate. Before long she identifies the vehicle used to collect the weapons, but the car's owner has a watertight alibi. The man driving that night was Ricky Janisch, a neo-Nazi and member of the extreme right-wing group, the Southwest Brigade. Bonì and her team put Janisch under surveillance, and identify others belonging to the extreme right. The further they probe, the more shocking their discoveries. Could this be part of a much more powerful neo-Nazi network which will stop at nothing? And how will they prevent an attack when the perpetrators are always a step ahead and they don't know the target? By the time Bonì pinpoints the victim, it may already be too late . . .

July 2024

Nordland. A region in the Norwegian Arctic; a remote valley that stretches from the sea up to the mountains and the glacier of the Blue Man. It is May. In Nordland it's a time of spring and school-leavers' celebrations - until Daniel, a popular teenage boy, goes missing. Conflicting stories circulate among his friends, of parties and wild behaviour.  As the search for Daniel widens, the police open a disused mine in the mountains. They find human remains, but this body has been there for decades, its identity a mystery. The story is told through characters impacted by these events: misanthropic Svea, whose long life in the area stretches back to the heyday of the mines, and beyond. She has cut all ties with her family, except for her granddaughter, Elin, a young misfit. Elin and her friend Benny, both impacted by Daniel while alive, become entangled in the hunt for answers, while Svea has deep, dark secrets of her own. The Long Water is by Stef Penney.

Why Hackney? By Joe Thomas

When I was a boy, an Irish woman called Lil would clean our house from time to time. Her son, Tony, was older than me, Hackney-born. He became a builder, started off working with our next-door neighbour, Harry, which meant a fair few lunchtimes in the public bar of the Prince of Wales trying to keep up with the older labourers. He’d do odd bits and pieces at ours, too. I was fourteen, I think, when he suggested we go for lunch at a caff on Chatsworth Road. I got in his car – I remember it was very low to the ground – and we drove off. Just past Rushmore, my old school, there were a couple of blokes about Tony’s age waving at him and he pulled over. There was also a young lad with them, younger than me. Wait here, Tony told me, and he got out. I watched the three older blokes in animated conference. When they were finished, Tony and another fella climbed back in, and the other one and the young one got into another car. I remember we drove around for about five minutes before coming to a sudden stop, a teenage boy panicking on the pavement. Engine running, Tony and the bloke jumped out, grabbed the kid, and then pinned him against the wall. The other one and the young one got out of the other car and went over. They were carrying a baseball bat. I could see the young one answering questions, nodding. The teenager handed over a watch, crying. Nothing happened for a moment, and I waited, nervous. What would be the punishment? Clearly this bigger kid had nicked this younger kid’s watch, and the younger kid had got his big brother to sort it out, which he had. Let’s have lunch, then, I was thinking. Then I watched as the teenager was force-fed the watch. He was eating the watch, I realised, eating it. Punishment fitting the crime and all that. In the caff, over bacon, egg, chips, and beans, no one really talked about it, and I certainly never told anyone.

I wanted to write about where I grew up, Hackney, in the late-seventies and eighties. Although White Riot is very much a political novel, it is also hugely personal: I accessed the sights, sounds, and smells of my childhood to try and recreate the sensual experience of it. I thought about how the place changed, who moved away, who stayed, why, who had power, who was disenfranchised, and why.

I’ve never wanted to write a whodunnit; I’ve always wanted to write about place, about fiction based on fact. My fiction addresses the discourses of power and the specificity of crime, why something happened precisely where it did, and is an attempt to illuminate the reasons why. You can strip away the layers of city in a crime narrative.

In the author’s note to her epic French Revolution novel, A Place of Greater Safety, Hilary Mantel writes: ‘The reader may ask how to tell fact from fiction. A rough guide: anything that seems particularly unlikely is probably true.’ 

In White Riot, the more outlandish political events, the most shocking violence, the most brazen corruption scams are all real, or based very closely on real-life incidents. It has always seemed to me that real life offers the best structural and societal models around which to thread a fictional narrative. Crime is political, I think, and more politics is criminal than we’d care to admit. 

There’s that old adage: ‘You couldn’t make it up.’ 

More and more, I’m beginning to think that you shouldn’t.

White Riot by Joe Thomas (Quercus Books) Out Now

1978:The National Front is gaining ground in Hackney. To counter their influence, anti-fascist groups launch the Carnival Against Racism in Victoria Park. Observing the event is Detective Constable Patrick Noble, charged with investigating racist attacks in the area and running Spycops in both far-right and left wing groups. As Noble's superiors are drawn further into political meddling, he's inveigled into a plot against the embattled Labour government. 1983: Under a disciplinary cloud after a Spycops op ended in tragedy, Noble is offered a reprieve by an old mentor. He is dispatched in the early hours to Stoke Newington police station, where a young black man has died in suspicious circumstances. 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.

Photo credit: Oliver Holms

Three Book Friday with Hull Noir

Hull Noir are gearing up to record the next THREE BOOK FRIDAY. They will set it live 25th June (6pm) via YouTube. Tune in with Nick Quantrill and learn which titles make Dr Heather Martin & Joe Thomas tick

Joe Thomas on Life in São Paulo

 

Living in São Paulo you quickly get used to the normalisation of crime, the threat of crime. Driving is a good place to illustrate this: the winding up of your car windows when you stop; the jumping of red lights after a certain time of night; the constant checking that your doors are locked. It became clear to me that preparing for crime, or its prevention, is the same thing as living with its threat; one way or another, it very quickly becomes a mundane part of your daily life. Everyone knows someone who has suffered some terrible experience.

São Paulo exists in a state of heightened paranoia that lends itself to massive gun ownership, distrust of the police, and armies of private security. Drive around any relatively wealthy area and you’ll find high walls ringed with barbed wire, doormen, security teams, and CCTV everywhere.

When you drive into the garage in the building where I lived, you would identify yourself at the bulletproof glass booth in which three or four of the seguranças – security guards – sit. These guys are lovely and do more than just security: they run the building, taking barbeque bookings, organising events, helping with shopping and storage. 

However, carjacking in Morumbi does happen and they do do security. 

Here’s how:

Your stopped by thieves at a traffic light, one of which hops in the back with a gun trained on your head. When you approach your building, they crouch down low and tell you they’ll kill you if you do anything suspicious. So you wave nonchalantly at the glass booth and ghost inside. The thieves go from flat to flat stripping them of valuables, load up, and leave in the car in which they arrived, where you’ve been sitting patiently waiting with a gun trained on your head.

It’s a clever scam, if high-risk. 

So, in our building there is a system to protect against it. 

If you do happen to drive in with a couple of bad guys hidden in the back, you’re supposed to (calmly) park in a special bay which the security guys have designated as a signal to them that you’re in trouble. Once parked there, I don’t dare think what happens next. I never even bothered to find out which bay is designated as the signal. I lived more in fear of parking in it by accident and being forcefully ‘rescued’ by the seguranças, than I did of an actual carjacking.

One lunchtime at the British school where I worked, I tried to pop to the bank. The security guard stopped me. No one was allowed out. 

Turned out, the bank had been robbed about half an hour earlier and the two crooks were hiding somewhere in the neighbourhood. This is a posh neighbourhood, with spacious houses, foreign cars and private security booths on most corners. Later, I discovered that the police only manage to catch one of the thieves. The other was shot dead by a student’s private bodyguard. He was waiting around outside the school and noticed someone suspicious, pursued him, realised who it was and killed him. 

Shot him in the chest and head. A very professional job. 

You’d think that there might have been some legal repercussions, shooting someone dead in the street.

No one cared; the bodyguard a hero.

Most Paulistanos shrugged it off, clicked their teeth and said: 

‘Ah, menos um, ne?’ 

‘Oh well, that’s one less crook, am I right?’

The phrase is spoken with a shrug, with indifference, meaning the only good bandit is a dead bandit.

Bolsonaro had that message nailed on. His popularity in the election was based on a feeling that he would sort out crime. Bolsonaro made crime, undoubtedly a problem, into the problem.

My latest novel, Brazilian Psycho, is an occult history of the city of São Paulo from 2003 – 2019, told through the lens of real-life crimes. It reveals the dark heart at the centre of the Brazilian social-democrat resurgence and the fragility and corruption of the B.R.I.C economic miracle; it documents the rise and fall of the left-wing – and the rise of the populist right.

The questions at the heart of Brazilian Psycho are: how did it come to this? How did the country change over the sixteen years from Lula’s election to Bolsonaro’s? It’s a journey from the optimistic and progressive Brazil in the Lula years to a brutal right-wing regime, mirroring so much of the rest of the world.

Brazilian Psycho by Joe Thomas is out now in hardback by Arcadia.

Brazil, 1 January 2003: President Luis Inacio 'Lula' da Silva begins fifteen years of left-wing government. 1 January 2019: Jair Bolsonaro is inaugurated, a president of the populist right. How did it come to this? A blockbusting novel of our times, Brazilian Psycho introduces and completes Joe Thomas's acclaimed Sao Paulo quartet. Over sixteen years, a diverse cast of characters live through the unfolding social and political drama, setting in motion a whirlwind of plots and counterplots: the murder of a British school headmaster and the consequent cover-up; the chaos and score-settling of the PCC drug gang rebellion over the Mothers' Day weekend of 2006; a copycat serial killer; the secret international funding of nationwide anti-government protests; the bribes, kickbacks and shakedowns of the Mensalao and Lava Jato political corruption scandals, the biggest in Brazilian history. Brazilian Psycho weaves social crime fiction, historical fact, and personal experience to record the radical tale of one of the world's most fascinating, glamorous, corrupt, violent, and thrilling cities.