Thomas, Joe

  • Gringa

    £9.99

    Sao Paulo, 2013 – a city at an extraordinary moment in its history. Mario Leme, a detective in the civil police, has developed a friendship with a young English investigative journalist, Ellie. When she goes to meet a contact in central Sao Paulo, Mario observes from the street as she walks into a building and doesn’t come out. Inside, he discovers the dead body of a young man he doesn’t recognise, and Ellie’s phone lying on the floor. Told partly from Leme’s point of view, partly from Ellie’s, Gringa takes us through five days during the redevelopment of the centre of Sao Paulo in the run-up to the 2014 World Cup. Ellie’s disappearance links characters at every level of the social hierarchy, from the drug dealers and civil and military police to the political class she witnesses the feral brutality of urban breakdown.

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  • Paradise City

    £9.99

    Mario Leme is a low-ranking detective in the Sao Paolo civil police. Every day on the way to work he sets off early and drives through the favela known as Paraisopolis. It’s a pilgrimage: his wife Renata was gunned down at an intersection here a year ago, the victim of a stray bullet in a conflict between drug dealers. One morning, parked near the place where Renata died, he sees an SUV careen out of control and flip over. The driver Leo is killed, but before his body is removed, Leme is sure he sees bullet wounds. Leo’s death wasn’t an accident, he was murdered. Soon, his girlfriend turns up dead too. And if they were killed deliberately, perhaps Renata was too. Leme finds himself immersed further and further in the dark underbelly of Brazilian society, as corruption seeps from the highest to the lowest echelons, and the devastating truth about Renata begins to emerge.

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  • Brazilian Psycho

    £9.99

    Brazil, 1st January 2003: President Luis Inacio ‘Lula’ da Silva begins fifteen years of left-wing government. 1st 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’.

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  • Playboy

    £9.99

    Set against the backdrop of the biggest political corruption scandal in Brazilian history – the lavajato, so called as the dirty money was laundered and through black market money dealers in car washes around the country – ‘Playboy’ is the story of Leme’s attempt to clear his name, and find a young man’s killer. The playboy was a bagman – a doleiro – who assisted with laundering funds from kickbacks and shakedowns connected to the Petrobras oil company. But how did a privileged young man, well-connected, well-educated, with bright prospects, get mixed up in this awful business?

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