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WEIRDO
In 1984, 15-year-old Norfolk schoolgirl Corrine Woodrow was sentenced indefinitely for the ritualistic murder of a schoolfriend. With rumours of Satanism surrounding her, Corrine became a notorious hate figure. But 20 years later, re-examination of forensic evidence suggests that the 'Wicked Witch of the East' didn't commit her crime alone. Pensioned out of the Met after an altercation with a teenage gunman, Sean Ward finds himself investigating another juvenile delinquent when he agrees to take on Corrine's case for the QC determined to get her a re-trial. Travelling to the coastal resort where the crime unfolded, outsider Sean enters a world which has always known how to look after its own… 'An outstanding addition to the British crime-writing scene… Unsworth's ability to render the period so vividly makes for an immersive reading experience, and there can scarcely be a better writer of this sort of stuff in the land... the psychology of that hormone-hammered adolescence that girls go through can rarely have been so well evoked,' says DOUG JOHNSTONE in THE INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY |
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BAD PENNY BLUES
Police Constable Pete Bradley has done 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. Set against the background of 1960's London Bad penny Blues explores the murky world of the unsolved ‘Jack the Stripper’ murders of the 1960s in which the bodies of eight working girls were found in or along the Thames. The killings sparked the biggest manhunt in Metropolitan Police history, but the killer was never found. In Bad Penny Blues Cathi aims not to solve the mystery, but rather, as she puts it, to “create a parallel universe in which an explanation can be offered that ties together a series of intriguing coincidences uncovered during the course of my research.” “Bad Penny Blues is so fully a thing in itself, slowly developing its own rules, playing by them, teaching them to the reader, breaking them, then enforcing them even more strongly, until, with the book over, the world does not look quite as settled as it did before the book started.” – Greil Marcus “Bad Penny Blues is the English Black Dahlia and will establish Cathi Unsworth as the First Lady of Noir Fiction.” – David Peace |
 ISBN 1846686407 |
THE SINGER
1981: Vincent Smith meets Steve Mullin and Lynton Powell at a Sex Pistols gig in Doncaster, where he tries to kiss Sid Vicious’ bass and gets a bloody nose. With this baptism they form Blood Truth with drummer Kevin Holme. Notoriety soon follows. Riots in the audience, fighting with journalists and Vincent’s self-styled persona as The King of Nothing stoke up their reputation as the most incendiary act around. |
 ISBN 9781852428921 |
THE NOT KNOWING |
 ISBN 9781852429300 |
LONDON NOIR |
