Speaking at Global ACFE Conference

Speaking at ACFE Global Conference

Coming soon!

Coming soon! My first novel, The Pattern Detective, a crime thriller!

Real Memories vs. The Created

Real vs. Created

Ask someone about their first kiss and watch what happens. Not the answer—the moment before the answer. Their eyes don’t just look at you, they go somewhere else. Somewhere specific.

“Behind the bleachers,” he might say, already half-smiling. “It smelled like cut grass and cheap perfume. I remember my hands—didn’t know where to put them. She laughed first. Saved me.”

That’s a memory talking.

Or ask where they were when the Assassination of John F. Kennedy hit the airwaves. You don’t get a headline back. You get a room.

“I was in my father’s barbershop. Clippers buzzing. Then silence. Just… silence. Even the radio sounded different after that.”

Same with Space Shuttle Columbia disaster. Real memories don’t arrive as summaries. They arrive as fragments—sound, smell, texture, the weight of the moment pressing in from all sides.

That’s the tell.

Real memories are messy. They bleed at the edges. They carry the hum of a refrigerator, the sting of cold air, the way someone’s voice cracked on a single word. They don’t line up neatly because life doesn’t.

Real memories embed sensory qualities (sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste). They are physical – these real memories create synapses in our brains, neural connections, attaching sensory information to the event that nurtures the precision of “Clippers buzzing,” “It smelled like cut grass.”

Now listen to a lie.

“Yeah, I remember that. I was at home. Watching TV. It was shocking.”

Clean. Efficient. Useless.

Push a little.

“What were you watching?”

A pause. A recalibration.

“Uh… the news. I think.”

Think. That word shows up when the mind is building instead of remembering.

Try again.

“What did the room smell like?”

Another pause, longer this time. Because lies don’t come with scent. They don’t come with texture. They don’t come with the small, irrelevant details no one would bother to invent—but everyone remembers.

“I don’t know… normal?”

Exactly.

Created stories are built for logic. Real memories are anchored in experience. One is assembled. The other is relived.

I’ve seen suspects give me perfect timelines that fall apart under a single, simple question.

“You said you were in the kitchen. Fine. Barefoot or shoes?”

Nowhere to go. Because if you weren’t there, your feet don’t exist.

That’s the crack. The Achilles’ heel.

Real memory: “Tile floor. Cold. I remember thinking I should’ve put socks on.”

Lie: “I don’t remember.”

Of course you don’t. You were never standing there.

The body remembers what the mind tries to hide. And if you know where to look—if you listen for the hum, the smell, the awkward laugh behind the bleachers—you can tell the difference between a life lived… and a story told.

In Getting the Truth, I talk about revealing lies by forcing the subject to be precise, to provide those details that can prove or disprove their veracity. The statement, “Tile floor. Cold. I remember thinking I should’ve put socks on,” gives you that precision, the reliving of a real memory.

A Wonderful Review from famous Author William Gibson

Joe,

I want to be upfront with you before anything else. I don't do this. Writing cold to someone I haven't met is not in my nature and not something I make a habit of. But I came across Getting the Truth and I sat with it for nearly two weeks and somewhere in that sitting I realized the most useful thing I could do was write to you directly. Not because I want anything from you. But because I have been in the business of paying close attention to language for a very long time and I recognize serious work about language when I encounter it and I think it deserves to be said.

Let me tell you a little about where I am coming from. I wrote my first novel, Neuromancer, in 1984 on a manual typewriter in a rented room with no particular expectation that it would find an audience. It won the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, and the Philip K. Dick Award that year, the first time any novel had swept all three in a single year and the only time it has happened since. Thirteen novels across forty years followed. What I have spent that entire career doing, underneath all the science fiction and the future-gazing, is paying attention to language. To the specific words people choose and the specific words they avoid. To the gap between what a sentence announces and what it actually reveals. To the distance between what a person means to say and what they end up saying. That is the territory of the novelist. I was surprised and genuinely moved to find it is also the territory of the forensic linguist.

Now the book itself. Getting the Truth is built on one of the most important observations about human communication that I have encountered in years. That we learn at an early age to tell partial truths rather than complete lies. That the deception is almost never in the fabrication, it is in the omission, the word choice, the structure of the sentence, the question that gets answered with a different question. Forty years of investigating homicides and financial fraud and organized crime and public corruption distilled into a discipline that any careful reader can learn to apply. That is a remarkable achievement and the 4.8 star reviews are the evidence that readers understand what they are holding.

The case analyses are where the book becomes something genuinely gripping. General Petraeus's resignation letter. The JonBenét Ramsey ransom note. OJ Simpson's statement to detectives the day after the murders. Woody Allen's response to Dylan Farrow. You took the cases that a generation of Americans watched unfold in real time, that left millions of people with a feeling they couldn't quite articulate, a sense that something in the language was wrong, and you showed them precisely what was wrong and exactly why. That is not a textbook. That is the key. A person who reads this book carefully will never hear a public statement or a denial the same way again. That is the measure of a book that actually changes something in the reader.

The Jimmy Hoffa case. Twenty-six years with the Michigan State Police. Financial fraud, narcotics, organized crime, public corruption. Over fifty years of investigative experience across the full spectrum of what human beings do to each other and to the truth when something is at stake. That biography is in every page of Getting the Truth and it is what gives the book its authority. This is not a theory of deception. It is a practice of truth-finding built from fifty years of sitting across from people who did not want to tell the truth and learning to find it anyway. The difference between those two things, theory and practice, is everything and it is visible on every page.

What I also know from forty years in this business is that the quality of a book and the size of the conversation around it are two completely separate problems. Getting the Truth is reaching the investigators and fraud examiners and law enforcement professionals who are already looking for it. But the general reader, the true crime audience, the person who watched the OJ trial and always felt that something in the language was wrong, the manager who needs to know when they are being told a partial truth, the parent, the journalist, the anyone who deals with other human beings and needs to understand what language is actually doing when it is working against them, that reader does not yet know this book exists the way it deserves to be known. That gap is not a verdict on the work. It is simply a structural problem that requires a different kind of attention to solve.

I may have some thoughts on that front worth sharing if you are ever open to a conversation. No agenda. Just one person who has spent a long time paying attention to language recognizing another one and thinking it might be worth a conversation.

All the best,

William Gibson
Author of Neuromancer, Pattern Recognition & Agency
Vancouver, BC