Saffina Desforges
Biography
30-something fiction writer.
Sugar & Spice
Commercial fiction – crime thriller
120,000 words
Synopsis
Sugar & Spice is my first completed crime thriller. Available now on all major e-book publishing platforms.
Sugar & Spice is set across the UK, against the background of Britain’s fragmented criminal justice system, with the key protagonists the mother and partner of a murdered child.
While taking as their canvas the murky world of the psycho-sexual deviant, these works are multi-layered, with appeal to a broad audience. Beneath the fast-moving, commercial storytelling runs a torrent of sub-plots, while simultaneously engaging in an underlying intellectual debate about the nature of sexuality and how society treats, or rather fails to treat, offenders to its cost.
The story was inspired by two real-life events: Britain’s most prolific child-killer Robert Black; and a news story of a man who begged a Judge to give him a longer sentence, because he knew he would offend again, more seriously, if released without treatment.
Storyline:
The story opens with two boys finding the severed arm of a missing child in a London canal. For Claire Meadows and her partner Matt Burford the arrest of local sex-offender Thomas Bristow seems to offer closure. But doubts soon emerge. The Met officers who “interview” Bristow are from the Gene Hunt school of policing, and the confession is proven worthless when another child is killed whilst Bristow is awaiting trial.
Driven by the need to know, Claire meets with Bristow on remand, where he convinces her not only that he is innocent of harming her daughter, but that his previous convictions were not what they seemed. An uneasy friendship develops between the two.
Running parallel to this we meet Greg Randall, respectable accountant and utterly devoted father of six-year-old twins. Randall has a dark secret: A growing sexual interest in pre-pubescent children. Fearing he might one day compromise his daughters’ safety, and spurred on by the child-murders making the headlines, Randall seeks counselling at the prestigious private clinic, the Quinlan Foundation, licensed by the Home Office to treat sex-offenders. Randall’s struggle to balance his family life as he undergoes “therapy” runs alongside the main story until eventually the two story-lines inexorably converge.
With the Police making little progress in identifying the killer, a profiling expert is brought in, the details leaked to reassure the public. Meantime a second year psychology student in Liverpool, nineteen year old Ceri, is sketching her own profile. Her lecturer, Professor Gavin Large (earlier introduced as a friend of Matt’s) passes it on, and Claire and Matt are faced with a compelling indication that the official police investigation is on the wrong track.
Along with a fourteen year-old truant schoolboy Danny, Matt and Claire embark on their own investigation, teaming up with the student Ceri. But their efforts are preempted when the Police appear to make a major breakthrough.
The arrest of Greg Randall for the murders, just weeks before Christmas, has the nation breathing a collective sigh of relief. With Randall’s fantasies a matter of record, and a hoard of young girls’ underwear found in his drawer that he admits do not belong to his daughters, conviction seems a formality. Wary after Bristow, Claire and Matt are finally convinced when three separate DNA matches come back positive, including semen found on the victim’s body. The evidence is overwhelming. Randall will spend the rest of his life behind bars.
For Claire and Matt it’s a new year and a new start. Until a cryptic phone call from Ceri raises new doubts. With the Police just biding time until Randall’s final trial and conviction, Claire, Matt, Danny and Ceri renew their own efforts.
Inexorably they are led to the Quinlan Foundation, where both Bristow and Randall had been treated.
As the pace accelerates Mat and Danny go to Liverpool to meet Ceri, only to find the killer has got there first. This is the only graphic scene in a novel where, because of the age of the victims, the abuse is implied rather than described.
From here the story rapidly moves to its powerful dénouement amid the dark corridors of the Quinlan Foundation’s hidden Museum of Sex-Crime, where Matt, Claire and Danny together finally bring to an end one man’s reign of terror.
I am also working on two other projects:
Equilibrium, a dark, adult, Urban Fantasy. Due for publication mid-October 2011.
The Rose Red Crime Series: A series of crime novels (with a fairy tale theme, but set in modern day) centering around DI Cass 'Red' Rose and her team, watch this space!
Where to find Saffina Desforges online
Books
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Smashwords book reviews by Saffina Desforges
- Alleyman
on Dec. 07, 2010
I liked this - I think! Dark and unnerving, it was certainly worth a read, thank you! Saffina.
http://www.saffinadesforges.com
- Monsters Are Real
on Dec. 07, 2010
I think you have probably captured what every mother/father would like to do to the 'monsters' that you describe in this story. I enjoyed (probably not the right verb to use!) reading it.
Could do with a tiny tidy-up where punctuation is concerned, but on the whole, well-written
(4.67 from 12 reviews) 
