Райан Гаттис – лучшие книги

Jen B's been surviving at the nightmarishly brutal MLK High School just like everybody else: by following the rules. She avoids the Principal. She doesn't complain. She's loyal to her MLK 'family'. And, like 99.5% of the student body, she knows one form or another of martial arts.
When Jen's world-famous Kung-Fu champion of a cousin Jimmy Chang turns up, everyone wants a piece of him - including Ridley, resident drug lord and leader of the school's most violent gang. They all want to see the legendary martial-arts master defend himself during the school's merciless initiation ritual.
Except that Jimmy's made a promise never to fight again - a promise that soon leads to the murder of Jen's brother and a bloody final battle that engulfs the entire school.
Fast-paced, gritty and addictive, Kung Fu by Ryan Gattis is an extreme journey into high-school violence and the American Dream that feeds it.

That's when it hits me. I'm staring at a war zone. In South Central.
On an April night in 1992, Payasa learns that her older brother has been stabbed to death, his body left out in the road to rot. He was never involved. He was innocent. He didn't even carry a gun. And that messes with the rules, even for Lynwood, even for the streets.
But it's the first day of the LA riots, and the city is tearing itself apart. Fire-fighters, graffiti artists, nurses and law enforcement - all of them connected by this murder - find themselves caught in the mayhem. Every cop is distracted, and for the people who see the law as an enemy, it's a chance to settle old scores.
That's just too good an opportunity to miss.

In 1991, a black man named Rodney King was severely beaten by multiple white police officers after a high-speed car chase that ended in a suburb of Los Angeles, an event that might have escaped the eyes of the American public had a witness not videotaped it from his balcony. The officers were taken to court, but eventually acquitted, and thus spawned the 1992 Los Angeles Riots: six days of looting, arson, assault, and murder that spread from South Central LA into the Los Angeles metropolitan area, and only stopped after soldiers from the National Guard were called in as backup for the overwhelmed and vilified LAPD.

But on the streets of the South Central neighbourhood of Lynwood, the story played out differently than on the national news. In All Involved, Ryan Gattis weaves a narrative from the perspectives of people whose stories of the riots were never told--members of the gang underworld. Inspired by unprecedented access to the inner workings of these organizations, Gattis channels their experiences into a gritty, cinematic tale that is both shocking and devastating. Though the events of this book are fiction, every word is infused with authenticity and intimacy. Evoking the anger, the uncertainty, and the turmoil of those six days, Gattis turns Los Angeles from merely a setting to a living, breathing entity.

With the velocity of a fast-paced thriller and the commanding talent of an incredibly adept writer, All Involved is an epic story of race, revenge, loyalty--at once fiercely identifiable as a novel of Los Angeles, yet also recognizable as a story of America--its history, its prejudices, and its complexities, laid bare.