Inheritance of Secrets (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781499240399)

Colin Ferguson gave up being a member of the Bank of England in 1967 to retrain as a Probation Officer. His work began in Brixton with a very ethnically mixed community and where there was high crime rate. Then for two years he was a welfare officer in Holloway Prison after which he moved to Clapham Junction, which at that time was another highly deprived area. In 1079 he transferred to Reading on promotion and began to specialise in Juvenile and Family work. He studied for a masters degree at the University of Reading in Criminal Justice and wrote his thesis on a Joint agency approach to Juvenile Crime which he was involved with alongside the Police and Social Services and Education Welfare. He set up a County wide Service to the County Courts in Family welfare and helped to develop Mediation services in Berkshire as well as contact centres for children to meet with parents who were separated from them. In 1994 he too an early retirement fro Probation and retrained as a mediator working with families. He worked in Reading until at 70 he 'redeployed' and began to write. As a committed Christian much of his work has been in Christian poetry and especially new hymns. He has three self published books of hymns and is now working on the considerable amount of poetry he has written in the past. This is his first and only novel, though he has over fifty short stories in his portfolio. As a lay preacher in the United Reformed Church he is well used to public speaking. He is still involved as a Trustee with Mediation and is Vice-President of the Reading Criminal Justice Associates. Married in 1960 and still so, his four children and six grand-children still don't know what to make of him, but having seen so many sad cases of family breakdown in his career he knows how precious a good family is. Now in his mid seventies he still finds time to chair a local retirement club as well as his church involvement. What has motivated him? Perhaps being a homeless child with an alcoholic father and a long suffering mother has something to do with a belief in love being stronger than any tragedy.