Detectives Don't Wear Seatbelts - Book Review

Detectives Don't Wear Seatbelts - True adventures of a female P.I.
By Cici McNair
Hachette Books Group 2009

This is the autobiography of Clarissa McNair of Mississippi, a moneyed family. She had no idea what she wanted to do when she left college.So after she graduated, Cici moved to California trying to break into acting. When that failed, she bummed around Europe and Asia for several years, worked for the Vatican radio, worked for the CBC in Toronto and even got married to a Canadian. She was divorced within a year. By 1994 Cici was back in New York City trying to become a private investigator. She liked the idea of looking for missing persons.

In the PI business people who search for missing persons are called Skip Tracers. They are tracing the movements of people who skip town. I also considered doing this job, until I realised that you have to cold call friends and neighbours of the missing person and spew out a whole lot of lies in a convincing manner to get the friend/neighbour to give you some information. I am not good at telling lies.

Eventually after calling all the PI's in New York begging for a job, most of them said NO and then told her  to NOT work for Vinny Parco - because he was poison. Cici ended up working for Vinny Parco. He was the only person to give her a chance. She had no experience, no references, no car and no apartment. But Cici was a natural at the job. Her sucess rate in locating missing persons was higher than most PI's.

Cici describes various different methods of locating the mark. She describes lies and stories she used, when on the telephone, some of these stories she had to make up off the top of her head.  She describes what it is like to be on a long stakeout. The information in this book is interesting but eventually Cici's narrative and the stories becomes repetitive and somewhat boring. You can only do so many stakeouts and searches in a variety of different ways.

Cici now owns her own detective agency in Philadelphia. It is called Green Star Investigations. 

I gave up reading by chapter 30 (out of a total of 43 chapters).

The Spellman Files - Book Review

The Spellman files
by Lisa Lutz
Simon & Schuster 2007
Spellman Files - The Book

If you have ever thought about being a Private Investigator, well, this is THE book to read. Isabel "Izzy" Spellman is a private investigator for her parents family business - Spellman Private Investigators in San Francisco. Izzy has been working for her parents since she was 12.


She has learned all the tricks of surveillance, how to tail someone, how to write a surveillance report, and how to do a credit check and a background check on a suspect. If you want to know about the life of a PI then you gotta read this book.

This is the first book (supposedly) in a series of novels about the Spellman family. The family is chaotic. Izzy is 28 years old, and lives at home with her parents and younger sister. She wants to leave home and live somewhere else, preferably with a normal boyfriend, but she knows she cannot get a job because she has no other qualifications. Her only skills are running credit checks and background checks on her potential boyfriends. Izzy even tried working as a receptionist on the switchboard for an insurance company, but quit after 3 days and went back to being a PI.

Izzy is given a Cold Case (missing persons) file to see if she can find anything new. While she is investigating, Izzy is told to drop the case or a lawsuit will be filed. But she can't stop, so she keeps digging. She does eventually resolve the case and then shreds the file.

As most of you know, I love doing research, and most of a PI's job involves research. As a teenager, I seriously thought about becoming a PI for a while because I loved the idea of doing research. This was about the time Magnum PI was on TV. But then I discovered that PIs have to tell lies and fibs when they are calling around trying to confirm their information. I decided that I couldn't do that. I hate telling fibs.

In fact I once left a good job in New Zealand (with NZ Telecoms) because I hated being forced to tell lies to the clients. The clients used to ring up and ask How long is my phone going to be out of order? I was required to tell them, I apologise for the delay sir, but the cable is broken and its going to be out for about 2 days. Most of the time the cable technicians were telling us that it would be closer to five days before the cable was repaired. Eventually the constant lying got to me, so I left.