Bad Penny Blues

Step into the seedy underbelly of London on the cusp of the Swinging Sixties. Bad Penny Blues is the story of the hunt for a brutal serial killer targeting prostitutes in the west of the city, at the time a melting pot of immigrants from the Caribbean and Ireland, bohemian artists and media types, and even peers. Carnaby Street was just becoming the fashion centre of London and a new decade promised exciting possibilities.

Cathi Unsworth paints a vivid picture of 1960s London. This is the London of teddy boys, of Joe Orton, of a surge of immigration, of a new era of permissiveness where quite literally ‘anything goes’.

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.”