No Peace For The Wicked

It is 1956, and Lizzy is working in Soho when Peace comes to stay. Peace is a beautiful sixteen-year-old part-Chinese girl, the daughter - it turns out - of her employer Bandy Bunion's estranged sister. Peace has been at a boarding school in the country - but, tired of feeling lonely and of being bullied, she has run away, and does not intend to go back.

Lizzy, who lives above the nightclub run by Bandy and Sugarplum Flaherty, offers to take her in; she lost her own daughter - Rosie's best friend - to leukaemia two years previously and she feels a special bond with Peace. Life, Lizzy also feels, has been rather too quiet recently; but things are about to change dramatically. Bandy has got a new man in her life - a crook for certain, Lizzy thinks, especially when Bandy's valuables start to go missing. And Lizzy's got a new man too. TC is Rosie's dad and everyone's favourite policeman. But is he interested in her?

But when Peace goes missing a second time, and no one knows where she's gone, it looks as though there's only one thing to do. Lizzy asks TC to help her find Peace, and the first place they must visit is the seedy dock area in Limehouse. The home of the Chinese community, it's a very dangerous place indeed...

Part of Pip Granger's early childhood was spent in the back seat of a light aircraft as her father smuggled brandy, tobacco and books across the English Channel to be sold in 1950s Soho, where she lived above the Two Is Cafe in Old Compton Street.She travelled in Europe and Asia in the 1960s and '70s, and worked as a Special Needs teacher in Hackney in the 1980s, before quitting teaching to pursue her long-cherished ambition to write. She now lives in the West Country with her husband and pets.

Pip Granger first novel,Not All Tarts Are Apple, won the Harry Bowling Prize for fiction.Not All Tarts Are Apple,The Widow Ginger,Trouble in ParadiseandNo Peace for the Wicked(all of which feature the same cast of characters from 1950s Soho) are available as Corgi paperbacks.

The fourth in Pip Granger's acclaimed Soho series of novels featuring nine-year-old Rosie - and Lizzy, a heart-warming new character destined for adventure and romance.