Reviews

This was an engaging trip into the world of a private investigator, not just any PI, but one very particular PI, the author Susan Lehmann. While Susan and I spent countless hours together in rural Alabama doing death penalty mitigation field work, much of her story was new to me. The stories in Southern Lies and Homicides shine a light on the work and the people, the tribulations and surprises and gifts. But in these stories also witnessed Susan’s personal journey through events that made her swear and rant and laugh—and the things that battered her heart. Her very big heart.

Author Susan Lehmann applies with dazzling results her keen observational skills and captivating journalistic voice in Southern Lies and Homicides, a collection of remarkable stories about her experiences over two decades as a private investigator and capital mitigation specialist in the South. Her accounts are often funny, sometimes tragic and always compelling as she serves legal papers, sifts through garbage for evidence and catches cheating spouses in the act. In detailing her work with death row prisoners awaiting execution, she brings into sharp focus the heart-rending effects of poverty and injustice. Read Southern Lies and Homicides not only for entertainment, but also enlightenment.

Susan Waller Lehmann is that rarest of private investigators, and storytellers—one driven by curiosity and dedication and a powerful, perhaps nameless compulsion to dig as deeply as necessary, peeling away layer after layer, through complication after complication, to get at something like the truth—no matter how painful in the end. From her start in the business as a Sue Grafton-reading PI wannabe, to her years-long work on complex cases as a death-penalty mitigation specialist, Lehmann has maintained not only her investigative tenacity, and the skills to match, but also her deep and abiding sense of humanity, all of which she explores in this must- read collection of true tales of her lifetime in the business. As compelling as it is, the title of Lehmann’s book—Southern Lies and Homicides: Tales of Betrayal and Murder—barely scratches the surface of her deep dives into dark underworlds the rest of us are reluctant to openly acknowledge, but that we fear are there nonetheless, eroding the tenuous foundations of our lives. Lehmann’s memoir reads at times like the best PI procedurals, and at times like a literary genre of her own making—a meditation on family, and caring, and fear, and loss, and what can be salvaged from all the lost souls among us—including, at times, our own.