In advance of the September release of the memoir Detectives Don't Wear Seatbelts: True Adventures of a Female P.I. by CiCi McNair, Hachette Books is offering readers of In Reference to Murder in the U.S. and Canada five free copies of the book. To enter, send an e-mail with your name and complete mailing address to bv@bvlawson.com with "Detectives Don't Wear Seatbelts" in the subject line, between now and midnight on August 31st. The five winners will be selected via random drawing and announced here the next day.
CiCi McNair fled a suffocating and emotionally-abusive childhood in Mississippi as soon as she could, taking a more traditional route at first with a Bachelor of Arts degree in American history. She used that degree to good effect researching the award-winning CBC documentary Connections, about organized crime in Canada. That led to news anchoring in Rome and a news broadcast stint on Vatican Radio.
But that wasn't enough for McNair. After years traveling around Europe, she returned to New York in 1994, divorced, broke and "camping out in a borrowed apartment with an open suitcase under a dining room table." She impulsively decided to become a private detective and started calling agencies in the Yellow Pages starting with "A" and working her way down the alphabet, before she was hired on April Fool's Day by a firm willing to give her a chance. Since then, she's worked for an ex-homicide detective in Mississippi with her 84-year-old mother riding shotgun in the surveillance car, joined a zany private eye firm in Hell's Kitchen fighting counterfeiters, and worked undercover with New York City law enforcement investigating the Born to Kill gang in Chinatown and the Middle Eastern underworld west of Broadway.
Since 2003 she's been head of the international firm Great Star Investigations, first in Miami and now in Philadelphia. Her firm handles cases including counterfeit pharmaceuticals, missing persons, stolen art recovery, and murder. McNair herself also works as a court-appointed investigator handling capital and non-capital cases.
Detectives Don't Wear Seatbelts often reads like a first-person novel, and McNair has a flair for storytelling, as well as plenty of insights into her male-dominated field. Of her encounters with the Feebs (FBI), U.S. marshals, NYPD, Jersey cops, and others she encountered while working undercover in Chinatown, she says
"There were always ex-cops coming in and out of the office and others on the phone. The worst of them were racist, sexist, dishonest, and dumb. The best of them had a genuine urge or even a need to be protective of others. They were savvy and resourceful, and if there's anything I ever want to be called--it's that. Their brains turned me on. In every way. But I never did more than fantasize about making love to a detective. It would have been far too dangerous for my future. Detectives are skeptics, paranoid, and gossip like mad when they're not putting two and two together on their own. But it wasn't just fear of damaging my reputation. It would have made incest look like breaking a diet."
