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DETECTIVES DON'T WEAR SEATBELTS
by Cici McNair
Center Street, September 2009
354 pages
$22.99
ISBN: 1599951878


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

DETECTIVES DON'T WEAR SEAT BELTS: TRUE ADVENTURES OF A FEMALE P.I. is the memoir of CiCi McNair, discussing the rocky start to her detective career. One day, while she was living in New York City without money, a job, or even a place of her own, she decided to open the Yellow Pages and cold-call detective agencies to see if they would give her work. One finally did, and the rest of the book describes her entrée into that world, with scenes from all her first cases. Tracking down the fiancé who wasn't who he said he was. Offering herself as an escort to see if a businessman was running an illegitimate business on the side. Surveillance. Research. Both catching criminals and working with them. That half of the book would be interesting to anyone with a fondness for true crime or detective work.

But it's only half the book. The rest of it recounts McNair's private life and that part, true or not, reads like a particularly florid novel. When she's not talking about a glittering jet-set life full of exotic locations and fabulous friends, she's talking about her horrific childhood and her terrible relationship with most of her family, especially her abusive father. She talks about spending days swimming and drinking with her lover the Portuguese count, then takes a third of a chapter to explain that she spent horrific years waiting for her father to make good his threats to kill her. When she's not passing on those personal details, she's discussing how her exotic life made others see her, especially all the detectives who were convinced she was a CIA plant because they could find no background on her due to her whimsical, world-wide past...a conviction, we are told, that was shared by many people previously.

Frankly, it's all a bit much, especially going over the top when McNair complains that other detectives didn't take her seriously because she was a woman and didn't have a law-enforcement background. She doesn't spend a lot of time seriously examining why anyone should take her seriously - a woman with no history of holding a job for more than a year or two, who did next to no research before becoming a detective, and who likes to brag how many people over the years were convinced she was some sort of Jane Bond-esque spy. Actually, she seems to like to brag, period, revelling as much in the terrible things she has overcome and the delightful things she has done. All of it adds up to a story that might be true, but is awfully hard to swallow.

Reviewed by Linnea Dodson, October 2009

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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