Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    All Involved: A Novel
    All Involved: A Novel
    All Involved: A Novel
    Audiobook11 hours

    All Involved: A Novel

    Written by Ryan Gattis

    Narrated by Anthony Rey Perez, Marisol Ramirez, Jim Cooper and

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    A propulsive and ambitious novel as electrifying as The Wire, from a writer hailed as the West Coast's Richard Price—a mesmerizing epic of crime and opportunity, race, revenge, and loyalty, set in the chaotic streets of South Central L.A. in the wake of one of the most notorious and incendiary trials of the 1990s

    At 3:15 p.m. on April 29, 1992, a jury acquitted three white Los Angeles Police Department officers charged with using excessive force to subdue a black man named Rodney King, and failed to reach a verdict on the same charges involving a fourth officer. Less than two hours later, the city exploded in violence that lasted six days. In nearly 121 hours, fifty-three lives were lost. But there were even more deaths unaccounted for: violence that occurred outside of active rioting sites by those who used the chaos to viciously settle old scores.

    A gritty and cinematic work of fiction, All Involved vividly re-creates this turbulent and terrifying time, set in a sliver of Los Angeles largely ignored by the media during the riots. Ryan Gattis tells seventeen interconnected first-person narratives that paint a portrait of modern America itself—laying bare our history, our prejudices, and our complexities. With characters that capture the voices of gang members, firefighters, graffiti kids, and nurses caught up in these extraordinary circumstances, All Involved is a literary tour de force that catapults this edgy writer into the ranks of such legendary talents as Dennis Lehane and George V. Higgins.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperAudio
    Release dateApr 7, 2015
    ISBN9780062390226
    All Involved: A Novel
    Author

    Ryan Gattis

    Ryan Gattis is the author of Safe, Kung Fu High School, and All Involved, which won the American Library Association’s Alex Award and the Lire Award for Noir of the Year in France. He lives and writes in South Los Angeles, where he is a member of art collective UGLARworks, a founding board member of arts non-profit Heritage Future, and a PEN America Prison Writing Mentor.

    More audiobooks from Ryan Gattis

    Related to All Involved

    Related audiobooks

    Crime Thriller For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Trouble Brews In Minnesota

      Jul 29, 2019

      Edith and Helen Calder haven’t spoken in decades. The sisters’ rift began after the death of their father, who left all the money from the family’s farm to Helen so she could fulfill her dream of opening a brewery. In J. Ryan Stradal’s The Lager Quee

      1 min read

    • Article

      ‘I Hear The Screams’: 107-year-old Survivor Of 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Testifies To Congress In Call For Justice

      May 20, 2021

      Moments after falling asleep on 31 May, 1921, seven-year-old Viola Fletcher was awakened by her family and told to leave her home in the Greenwood neighbourhood of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Outside, a white mob drove thousands of Black residents from their ho

      3 min read

    • Article

      The Minders

      Oct 7, 2020

      RELEASED OUT NOW! 448 pages | Paperback/ebook/audiobook Author John Marrs Publisher Del Rey John Marrs’s latest near future, high-concept techno-thriller isn’t so much a sequel to The One (DNA dating app has dark secret) and Passengers (autonomous ca

      1 min read

    • Article

      Killer instinct

      Oct 24, 2019

      Killer instinct
      3 min read

    • Article

      Femi Kayode

      Feb 4, 2021

      Femi Kayode
      6 min read

    • Article

      Woman About Town

      Jul 28, 2022

      Woman About Town
      5 min read

    • Article

      LeTteR Bocks

      Aug 4, 2022

      ◻PLEASE find attached this trademark from a box of eggs, which appears to show a chicken lifting its leg to crack off an eggy one. Susan Butcher, Australia ◻FORMER Prime Minister Boris Johnson has been criticised for meeting an ex-KGB agent without h

      13 min read

    • Article

      Royal Hotel, Mt Hope

      Nov 14, 2018

      Royal Hotel, Mt Hope
      6 min read

    • Article

      Speedboat

      Mar 24, 2022

      Nobody died that year. Nobody prospered. There were no births or marriages. Seventeen reverent satires were written – disrupting a cliché and, presumably, creating a genre. That was a dream, of course, but many of the most important things, I fi nd,

      14 min read

    • Article

      THE God father

      Jan 23, 2020

      THE God father
      6 min read

    • Article

      Home Sweet Home

      Sep 1, 2022

      Home Sweet Home
      3 min read

    • Article

      My Dad Sold Fords

      May 1, 2023

      My Dad Sold Fords
      6 min read

    • Article

      Four Poems

      Jan 1, 2024

      I’ve always been an easy crier (let it come, not ashamed, never held it back in joy or grief, and wherever … subway, teaching, grocery store, (oh the desolate grocery store during the height of Covid) but now, the welling up: that’s daily now. —Lia P

      5 min read

    • Article

      Complaints Department

      May 23, 2020

      Complaints Department
      4 min read

    • Article

      Let’s Say

      Oct 7, 2022

      I magine a sticky, early August morning, around three o’clock. It is dark, the moon blocked by clouds, no streetlights, a siren in the distance, medics running to a heart attack. Imagine a man out on a bike or walking a sick dog, or maybe a woman who

      10 min read

    • Article

      What’s Showing AT THE Ritz?

      Aug 14, 2020

      What’s Showing AT THE Ritz?
      8 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for All Involved

    4/5

    71 ratings5 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      All Involved, is a powerful and sometimes disturbing novel set in Los Angeles during the 1992 riots following the acquittal of two police officers for the beating of Rodney King. The six sections of the book (representing the six days of the riot) follow the lives of those involved in the riot. It examines the intertwining of the lives of gang bangers, residents, emergency services personal and innocent by-standers during this sad time. This book contains graphic violence, drug use and sexual references - some people may find this upsetting.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
      An ambitious attempt to cover gang life in Los Angeles during the Rodney King riots in 1992, told from multiple first person perspectives. Like other reviewers, I was hooked by the first chapter, engaging instantly with Mexican cook Ernesto and shocked by his vicious murder, but just couldn't connect with the rest of the characters, from Ernesto's hard bitten teenage sister Lupe to a fireman caught up in the violence. Gattis tries for authenticity with Hispanic dialect and slang terms, overexplaining for white readers who have never watched a TV show or read another novel depicting street kids, yet fails to create a second sympathetic personality after Ernesto is killed. I got the theme - everyone is 'involved', both in gangs and in the lives and deaths of others - and the novel certainly generates a vivid portrait of six lawless days in Los Angeles, but I need more than action and violence, sorry. Also the little teenage 'homies' were faintly ridiculous, with their 'street names' like Clever and Trouble - hey, guess the coded origin behind those monikers, if you can! - and obsession with 'respect'. Ernesto's death in the first chapter is in retaliation for the accidental shooting of another gang member's sister, and then Ernesto's death is 'avenged' by his sister, kicking off an epic gangland battle of tit for tat - who or what is supposed to deserve respect in a group of high school dropouts with more bullets than brain cells? Nurse Gloria, who has to bribe private mortuary workers to come and pick up Ernesto's body from the gutter, and the fireman who watches his friend take a brick to the face are about the only sane voices in the story ('Excuse me if I never stopped to consider the motive of fucking gangbangers because I’m too busy dropping hose and ducking a chucked rock the size of a softball.')My other issue is with the first person narration - writing convincingly in one 'voice' is hard enough and Gattis has about fifteen different characters on the go, but either the narratives sounded the same or didn't match the characters who were supposed to be speaking. The dialect and slang slipped in and out depending on how much exposition the author was trying to fit into a chapter, and gang members were either explaining simple Spanish terms or waxing lyrical on the history of Los Angeles, breaking the literary fourth wall with the author's research. One character delivering a personal view interspersed with regular old third person would have worked better for me.Despite the 1990s timeline, the subject is sadly still socially relevant - there's a line about a twenty year cycle of riots that is only a year or two out - but I just couldn't connect with any of the characters.
    • 4/5
      Ryan Gattis spins in All Involved a complex novel mainly about coming of age and finding family in a culture / community-place immersed in violence by way of extreme inequalities. Having been raised in this community, South Central Los Angeles, I found Gattis writing and research thorough and rendered characters, mostly, realistic. This book is about the six-day riots in Los Angeles in 1992, and about the gangs that arranged things among themselves in these times of lawlessness. We understand what 'no-go zones' are. But we can also deduce a lot about the situation in places where the gangs are not so ubiquitous. We understand why the police are afraid of blacks. We understand why blacks remain frustrated. We understand that the situation is as it is and will remain hopeless unless very, very serious action is taken.All Involved was a wonderful, and heartbreaking, book to read, of course it's violent, those gang members do commit atrocities but it is set against the backdrop to understand what drives some to choose this life and how being trapped in this way causes some to enter a life of spiraling violence. But if it gets too violent for you, one piece of advice: read on. Because Ryan Gatts alternates with softer chapters, and sometimes there are even a lot of soft chapters.Strangely enough, it hit me the hardest towards the end. The brutal, horrifying and gross violence is terrible. But the misery of families and people who are not in a corridor is so profoundly unfortunate. it is by way of troubling content set against relationships and family that, for this reader, found the story beautiful and exciting, and human.In any case, you get a beautiful style and a super fast rhythm. You get to know the people who are behind those acts, the members of gangs, those who live on the edge of a corridor, and also the social workers (social workers who deal, after all, they know the network very well), the life of firefighters, police, nurses. How much police there is for such a big city where everything goes wrong. How angry the police and firefighters are because not a single police officer has been convicted, those riots might not have erupted.Gatts wrote this book about the six days in Los Angeles in such a way that we will never forget those days. But above all, we also learn who the people who live in such neighborhoods, gang members and others, even after those six days. Still today. There have been such riots before. What has changed? Nothing. The situation is still just as explosive. A very timely book to dig into, now. Recommended!Audiobook:Beautifully by a stellar full cast ensemble: Adam Lazarre-White, Anthony Ray Perez, James Chen, Jim Cooper, Marisol Ramirez. The voice acting is spot on and not distracting while rendering real convincing versions of the voices, accents, and intonations that I grew up with. Most Excellent. The readers all deliver performances and drive the story forward with emotion appropriate to the text. All of the way through the performances are, again, flawless. The audio quality is great - no 'empty room' sound.
    • 4/5
      This is a really challenging book based on the inter-related activities of a number of characters, good and bad, during the 'Rodney King riots' period in LA. Each chapter is written in the first person, and since many of the characters are Mexican-American gang members the way the English language is used varies greatly throughout the book. It's unrelenting in its darkness, and although the 'inside' nature of the narration almost gives you a sympathetic feeling toward a few of the characters, the fact of the matter is that almost all of them are killers.

      Interspersed with the accounts of the gang battles, arsons, and murders are chapters by some of the 'good guys' or 'uninvolved' people (meaning uninvolved in gang life)- the Korean shop owner, the fireman who witnesses a gruesome assault by a black youth on a fellow fireman just trying to do his job, various law enforcement personnel....

      I definitely recommend this book if you can take the violence and its overall 'downer' nature. Personally, my only problem with it is the uneven nature of the narration, but others may not have an issue with it. Otherwise, the way the story is woven together is extremely well-done, the characters are developed pretty well considering the relatively short length of the book, and the intensity is at a very high level throughout.
    • 4/5
      A compelling account of the six days of rioting in Los Angeles in the spring of 1992, told from the various points of view of different protagonists.