About C J

CJ - cropped

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

CJ with the Minister for Crime Prevention, Charles Wardle

Comments
  1. Christine Partington says:

    Can’t wait to read the book! If it’s anything as exciting as CJ’s life seems to have been, it will be a great story. C. O. P.

  2. Christine Partington says:

    Hallo Chris. I’ve just finished reading Revenge Ritual for the second time and got a lot more out of it this time around. I was so keen to read it originally that I really raced through it, and sometime got a bit lost when the ‘voices’ changed, but enjoying it all the while. This time, knowing the story, I could just relax and enjoy the characterisation, and those ‘voices’ were also perfectly clear to me. Elaine in particular reveals herself to be sinister long before i grasped that on first reading. Clever of you to leave her ‘on the loose’ at the end as she has some unfinished business that may appear in a sequel. Will be waiting for that! Don’ keep us waiting too long. Christine

  3. Very interesting career. I shall read this book with interest, and some fellow feeling.

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