Temptress is the life story of Linsey Dawn McKenzie, whose remarkable (and completely natural) physical statistics made her an overnight star of the glamour industry at the age of just 15. It is told with a clear sense of fellow-feeling by Southend author Vikki Dark.

Vikki is now a seriousminded academic. But her life has followed much of the same arc as Linsey’s. In her younger days Vikki too was involved in the business.

First, the author. Vikki’s own story is typical, except in one respect. “It started with a terrible relationship with my mother,” she says. “I left home at 14 years old to stay with people I didn’t really know.

“I got a much older boyfriend, then just fell into the glamour industry. At first I thought it was fun. Then it became very oppressive, but I didn’t knowwhat that word meant back then. I went through a long period of darkness.”

Vikki’s life could have entered a nosedive. What brought her back from the brink was the process of writing. “It became my therapy,” she says. “I wrote pages and pages and pages and pages.”

Writing gave her the bounce she needed to resume her education. She did A-levels, a BA, a masters. Now, in her mid thirties, she is well embarked on a PhD. And she has kept on writing.

Temptress is her fourth book.

The book has a clear agenda. “What I am fighting against is the graphic depiction of women as fodder,” Vikki says.

“It also deconstructs common perceptions of what it means to be a glamour model.Glamour models are not empowered like they believe they are. They are merely brainwashed.”

Vikki doesn’t insert these opinions into the book. There is no need. Linsey Dawn McKenzie’s career comes across as a case study supporting what Vikki says.

Linsey’s childhood was unremarkable, but by the age of 13 she, and those around her, had become conscious of the stand-out feature that was to make her famous.

The team at the Sport newspaper, which first brought Linsey’s attributes to the attention of the wider world, could hardly believe their luck.

As Vikki puts it: “The anatomical wonder was a financial powerhouse.”

Linsey quickly acquired fame in another guise, as what one newspaper headline termed a “dangerous harlot,”

a siren who specialised in luring happily married men into sin.

Hence the title, Temptress.

Her public persona as a serial femme fatale briefly landed her where she wanted to be, on the front page of the News of the World and the Sun.

But celebrity status did not last. The press found other star temptresses to obsess over. Linsey drifted from “glamour shots” to hard core porn. When Vikki interviewed her she was about to do a photoshoot for a fetish magazine.

Unlike her biographer, Linsey has never reinvented herself.

  • Temptress The Linsey Dawn McKenzie Story is published by Chimera @£14.99 ISBN 9781 903136522