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Cathi Unsworth began a career in journalism at nineteen on the music weekly Sounds, and has since worked for many music, arts, film and alternative lifestyle journals. She is the author of four other novels, Weirdo, The Not Knowing, The Singer and Bad Penny Blues, and the editor of the award-winning crime compendium London Noir, all published by Serpent's Tail. She lives in London.
Author photo © Julian Ibbitson
Maxim Jakubowski August 2015 Highly Recommended. Novel by novel, Unsworth is proving herself a unique talent in her power of evocation of time and place and this fifth outing set in London during the Blitz confirms her status as an idiosyncratic crime writer with a strong, individual voice. Based on actual real-life murders, where prostitutes were left mutilated, the sense of period resurrects the backstreets, darkness, and the contradictory glitter behind the wartorn facade of life with picaresque brio as a determined cop follows his instincts in a secret world of music halls, psychopaths, black marketeers, magicians and furtive shadows. Seldom has Soho's nightlife and heyday been drawn in such an appealing and scary way. To say the book is atmospheric would be an understatement, as the stale smell of cigarettes and moral disillusion wafts from every page. A considerable achievement. ~ Maxim Jakubowski
April 1943: four boys playing in Hagley Woods, Worcestershire make a gruesome discovery. Inside an enormous elm tree, there is the body of a woman, her mouth stuffed with a length of cloth. As the case goes cold, mysterious graffiti starts going up across the Midlands: 'Who put Bella in the Wych Elm?' To Ross Spooner, a police officer working undercover for spiritualist magazine Two Worlds, the messages hold a sinister meaning. He's been on the track of a German spy ring who have left a trail of black magic and mayhem across England, and this latest murder bears all the hallmarks of an ancient ritual. At the same time, Spooner is investigating the case of Helen Duncan, a medium whose messages from the spirit world contain highly classified information. As the establishment joins ranks against Duncan, Spooner must face demons from his own past, uncover the spies hiding beneath the fabric of wartime society - and confront those who suspect that he, too, may not be all he seems ...
Hush, hush, hush. Here comes the Bogeyman... London during the long, dark days of the Blitz: a city outwardly in ruins, weakened by exhaustion and rationing. But behind the blackout, the old way of life continues: in the music halls, pubs and cafes, soldiers mix with petty crooks, stage magicians with lonely wives, scandal-hungry reporters with good-time girls - and DCI Edward Greenaway keeps a careful eye on everyone. Out on the streets, something nastier is stirring: London's prostitutes are being murdered, their bodies left mutilated to taunt the police. And in the shadows Greenaway's old adversaries in organised crime are active again, lured in by rich pickings on the black market. As he follows a bloody trail through backstreets and boudoirs, Greenaway must use all his skill - and everything he knows about the city's underworld - to stop the slaughter.
London during the long, dark days of the Blitz: a city outwardly in ruins, weakened by exhaustion and rationing - and DCI Edward Greenaway keeps a careful eye on everyone. Out on the streets, something nastier is stirring: London's prostitutes are being murdered, their bodies left mutilated to taunt the police. As he follows a bloody trail through backstreets, Greenaway must use all his skill to stop the slaughter.
Maxim Jakubowski August 2015 Highly Recommended. Novel by novel, Unsworth is proving herself a unique talent in her power of evocation of time and place and this fifth outing set in London during the Blitz confirms her status as an idiosyncratic crime writer with a strong, individual voice. Based on actual real-life murders, where prostitutes were left mutilated, the sense of period resurrects the backstreets, darkness, and the contradictory glitter behind the wartorn facade of life with picaresque brio as a determined cop follows his instincts in a secret world of music halls, psychopaths, black marketeers, magicians and furtive shadows. Seldom has Soho's nightlife and heyday been drawn in such an appealing and scary way. To say the book is atmospheric would be an understatement, as the stale smell of cigarettes and moral disillusion wafts from every page. A considerable achievement. ~ Maxim Jakubowski
Corinne Woodrow was fifteen when she was convicted of murdering one of her classmates on a summer's evening in 1984, a year when the teenagers of Ernemouth ran wild, dressing in black and staying out all night, listening to music that terrified their parents. Twenty years later, new forensic evidence suggests Corinne didn't act alone. Private investigator Sean Ward - whose promising career as a detective with the Met was cut short by a teenage gangster with a gun - reopens the case, and discovers a town full of dark secrets, and a community that has always looked after its own. 'A gripping tale of adolescent angst and genuine evil' Daily Telegraph 'An absorbing mystery, an extraordinarily powerful evocation of time and place' Guardian
Police Constable Pete Bradley has one year in the force and dreams of moving up the ladder. He's assigned as an aid to CID and working a routine nightshift with his partner when they stumble across a young woman's body. She was working as a prostitute when she was strangled, her body dumped by a riverbank. His search for her killer brings him deep into Soho's underbelly. Meanwhile Stella, a young fashion designer with a promising career ahead of her, is woken by terrifying nightmares that echo the last hours of the dead women. Sixties London explodes in all its ferocious colour, with fascists and Teds, migrants and hippies living in close proximity. Bad Penny Blues is a tender paean to the city, a novel with a twisted mystery at its heart.
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