C J Browne

CJ Browne started working for the Home Office as a principal officer in the Crime Prevention Unit about 13 years after PD James vacated a similar post. Her work ranged from briefing and escorting Ministers to helping community groups create safer streets and speaking at conferences. Or from meeting prison officers to improve safety in custody to managing grants for CCTV schemes. CJ also went ‘under cover’ to investigate the safety of women travelling on public transport after dark.

The work was often exciting and risky, like the time she was waiting in a police car in Baltimore (think ‘The Wire’) while officers attended a burglary and the robbers escaped past the car still holding their guns. Sometimes the work was very moving, like the research meeting with mothers in Chicago. They were busy sewing squares together for a quilt. Each square represented one of their children killed by the gangs.

CJ has also been a probation officer, lecturer in psychology, consultant for a crime prevention charity and Government Advisor for public order. She set up Neighbourhood Safety Projects around the UK, established The Resolving Differences Programme and used her Winston Churchill Fellowship to research community policing and drug prevention in the USA and Bermuda.

CJ Browne has given up preventing crime to write about it. Revenge Ritual is her first novel.

CJ with the Minister for Crime Prevention, Charles Wardle