A Doodle by da Vinci

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Where Big Brother meets One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest...
Take a sample of the country's most notorious sex killers, stir them with a regular mix of murderers and sundry bad eggs from the prison system, lock them away like chickens in a henhouse then slip in the metaphoric ferret... The ferret in this case is a therapy regime that starts by whipping away the inmate's props and support systems. Designed to create emotional vulnerability this process destabilises the prisoner/patient. As if this situation was not volatile enough try compounding the intrigues with intrinsic staff corruption and you have B Wing of the experimental psychotherapy prison, HMP Grendon...
Grendon Prison is a real establishment nestling deep in the Buckinghamshire countryside. This history was drafted from authentic prison diaries that won the Koestler Award for the diarist. Chris has taken those writings and, whilst strictly maintaining their integrity, has transcribed them into this book.
But for name changes and minor conflagration bound by a thin veneer of fiction this is a true account and relatively unembellished. The characters are real, the crimes are real life accounts as presented by the offenders or from their depositions, the therapy is all completely genuine and the sex authentic. Any reader wishing to clarify matters of fact can communicate with the author at chrisdeanauthor.blogspot.co.uk or by email at [email protected].
Only the final pages of the denouement are fiction and were imagined by the diarist during the poisoning episode at the end of the book. Staff conflation has been necessary to make the cast manageable effectively applying genuine dialogues, events, character traits and behaviour to fewer characteres. Two of the inmates have also been conflated from four but their crimes, therapy and behaviour remain authentic.

This book was seriously considered for publication by Harper Collins but they reluctantly passed it as it did not sit comfortably in the pigeon holes of any of their lists. The author could have compromised the expose by consolidating the work into a pure thriller but felt the integrity of Grendon's therapy regime needed to be placed in the public arena. "An extremely powerful and disturbing work with considerable strengths ... conveying institutional life with a great perception," Nick Sayers, Harper Collins.