Reviews

Susan Lehmann’s collection of in-the-field case stories is an entertaining and candid peek behind the curtain at the real work of private investigations. With a former journalist’s storytelling instincts and a detective’s eye for the perfect, telling detail, Lehmann offers a fascinating highlights reel of her investigative life, describing the daily tediums, human dramas, case-breaking discoveries, and alarming confrontations that make up a PI career. Interspersed with thrilling action sequences are flashes of empathy and insight, as Lehmann illuminates the complicated human lives at the heart of her cases. Southern Lies and Homicides is part memoir and part field guide to process service, surveillance, and mitigation investigations. It’s an essential read for rookie PIs, anyone considering this profession, or spy-curious civilians.

The lucid stories in Susan Lehmann's Southern Lies and Homicides are deceptively forthright. and move along at a steady pace holding one's interest and sparking imagination. Whether recounting tangled lives pursuing the coldly determined ruin of others or the convoluted journeys to tragically inevitable resolution, Lehmann's narratives are devoid of sentimentality, or the purple language invited by the often unseemly facts. Yet gradually, a humanity emerges built upon the salient details that fleetingly, but movingly expose deep sorrows and lifetimes of never having a chance. It's not always the guilty who stand convicted in the more poignant stories. Profound and longstanding poverty, a justice system that layers itself over a community's life, compounding harm rather than relieving it, people living almost next door to redeeming possibilities that never materialize, like ships in the night, these are the elements in her more compelling stories. Each tale is a brush with some forlorn aspect of Americana. We can count ourselves lucky to be on the outside looking in.

From completing her first assignment to knowing what to do when a client lies, private investigator and author Susan Lehmann never disappoints in the riveting accounts she’s collected for her new book Southern Lies and Homicides. Lehmann includes in this reader-friendly and personalized book the varied cases that made up a PI business that began with serving legal papers, meeting lawyers and their assistants and befriending the secretaries and gatekeepers who became essential to her success. Her background as a reporter on the crime beat in a Florida newsroom provided the foundation for her expert sleuthing. Every scenario includes Lehmann’s personal dialogue exchanges and thoughts about these intense cases. She offers sound advice along the way. “Never, ever purchase a house that’s down the street from your former spouse.” And this to describe sorting through garbage to gather evidence. “One man’s trash is the plaintiff’s treasure.” Lehmann handles all these cases with finesse and grace. What unfolds in this excellent volume is a non-stop read that will have readers turning pages faster than her ability to locate her clients and capture the culprits.