Justin Quayle is a low-level British diplomat who has always gone about his work very quietly, not causing any problems. But after his radical wife Tessa is killed he becomes determined to find out why, thrusting himself into the middle of a very dangerous conspiracy.

Aimlessly whiling away their days in the concrete environs of their dead-end suburbia, Vinz, Hubert, and Said — a Jew, African, and an Arab — give human faces to France’s immigrant populations, their bristling resentment at their social marginalization slowly simmering until it reaches a climactic boiling point. La Haine means Hate.