Sandra Gregory

I bought this book in the Kindle store after it caught my eye while browsing the site during a lull at work. I have read a few books in the past about people being locked up in a foreign country and I always found them to be good books. In particular, The Damage Done by Warren Fellows, Marching Powder by Rusty Young and Hotel K by Kathryn Bonella were fantastic books. This book gets very good reviews so I really looked forward to getting stuck into it.

The story starts in a familiar way, with a young woman traveling through Thailand who falls on hard times. Although she had enjoyed her travels things start to go wrong and she decides that she should head back to the UK. The problem is lack of money and she can't afford her airfare back home. She is too proud to ask her parents for the money and decides to tough it out and see if she can raise the money herself. As is common in these tales she had been offered work smuggling previously but turned it down due to the risks involved.

However, when she is struggling financially she bumps into the acquaintance again and is convinced that she should do this one job. She is told that she will be traveling with her friends and that customs have been paid off so everything will be fine. Everything is not fine and she gets caught and arrested. What follows is a very emotional tale of a young woman struggling to survive in a foreign jail where killing is a regular occurrence. She battles to say safe and sane in a prison where brutality is the order of the day and there is no defined end to the sentence.

The second part of the book takes place back in the UK where she is transferred to serve out the rest of her sentence. It turns out that she is considered a high risk prisoner and is kept in the same conditions and prison as serial killer Myra Hindley. She is also serving a sentence far longer than that of convicted murders. If she had been convicted in the UK she would have only served a few years.

This was a decent read but I think I maybe have a bit of 'Banged Up Abroad' fatigue. None the less, I would recommend this book as it was very interesting.… (mehr)

This was better than I thought it was going to be. I bought it years ago, after seeing the film Brokedown Palace (about two American girls who are jailed in Thailand for drug smuggling), but it's sat on my bookshelf for well over ten years without tempting me, as it always looked a bit airport-book-ish.

It's surprisingly well written, and Gregory is humble in her account. For me, her treatment in the UK prison service was far more shocking than her experiences in Thailand. Although at times I wondered if she were as innocent as she made out in the reasons for her being moved between different jails.

I liked how the story examined why she smuggled drugs in the first place, and the stories of other prisoners were heartbreaking to read. But I did feel the ending was a bit rushed - I'd have liked to know more about how transitioning into daily life was for her.… (mehr)