McNair, Cici: Detectives Don't Wear Seat Belts

Center Street © 2009, 368 pages

Note: Review copy received from publisher. Amazon affiliate: Links pointing to Amazon contain my affiliate ID. Sales resulting from clicks on those links will earn me a percentage of the purchase price.

In her book Detectives Don't Wear Seat Belts, Cici McNair introduces readers to her very unusual life. As the title suggests, she's a private detective (see Green Star Investigations), and stories about her experiences as a detective form the backbone of her memoir: her initial attempts to break into the business, stake-outs with guys with thick accents and foul mouths, investigations into counterfeit property or accusations of rape or lunchtime shenanigans, wearing a wire in the diamond district, in seedy warehouses, in a massage parlor. The author walks us through her role in a great many cases. It's fascinating, real-life stuff, the nitty gritty of detection, from paperwork to phone calls to the innumerable times the author has had to fake her way through a meeting to get information. She assumes an identity, swallows the information she'll need to pass herself off, and walks into a dangerous situation to lie her way through it and get her mark to say something incriminating on tape.

Woven through this main narrative are two equally interesting threads. The first has to do with the author's family: brothers and a sister whom an ex-homicide detective and friend of McNair's described as "the worst people I've ever met in my life"; Cici's mother, a likable, genteel Southern lady who was, however, abused during parts of her life; and the author's father, a menacing figure for whom an early death was insufficient reward. Finally there are the pre-detective days, which McNair spent rootless, traveling around the world and consorting with exciting characters--gun-runners and princes and the occasional fiancé. She's been suspected more than once in her life of working for the CIA, which is not the sort of thing that's said behind the back of your average suburban housewife.

McNair's book is--I'll use the word again--a fascinating read. It could have been a bit shorter: those descriptions of the guys she's worked with--and in particular, some of their dialogue--could have been cut back. (Readers should persevere if they're put off by this in the book's early chapters.) But I'm very happy to have read it.