About the author

Deanne Acuña

​​​​​​​<strong>Deanne Acuña</strong> didn't set out to become a private investigator. She set out to prove something. From early childhood, she knew things she had no ordinary way of knowing — when family members were about to die, what a nonverbal cousin needed without a single word passing between them, where a missing person was before she had an address or a name. Her left-brained family quietly relied on her while publicly chalking it up to coincidence. Deanne wanted harder answers than that. She thought if she could work in a world built on facts and evidence, she might finally understand how the knowing worked.<br>​​​​​​​<br>What she found instead was that the two couldn't be separated. Over more than thirty-five years working civil cases in the Los Angeles area, Deanne built a reputation for locating people no one else could find — witnesses with no known address, biological parents who had vanished decades earlier, defendants who had every reason to stay hidden. She didn't do it the way other investigators did. She followed what she called her gut, which she understood, over time, as something more precise than instinct: a trained psychic perception she had carried since childhood and learned, through years of high-stakes fieldwork, to trust under pressure. She was careful never to let that ability overshadow her standing as a credentialed professional. Licensed by the California Department of Consumer Affairs' Bureau of Security and Investigative Services, she was also a Certified Legal Investigator (CLI) through the National Association of Legal Investigators and a Certified International Investigator (CII) — distinctions that reflected not just experience but a rigorous commitment to the standards of her profession. She relied as much on common sense as on her sixth sense, and she expected the same from the select team of associates she built around her, including her daughter, Kimberly Acuña.<br>​​​​​​​<br>Her cases took her into the Los Angeles garment district with nothing but a first name and a feeling. Into adoption reunions that ended in joy, and others that ended in grief. Into cemeteries in rural England photographing spirits alongside her skeptic uncle, who had seen the ghost with his own eyes and still needed to be convinced. Into a slip-and-fall at a grocery store, photographs taken while security looked straight through her. Into a courtroom in the California desert where a judge called the opposing attorney by his first name and her father's entire estate was decided in fifteen minutes. That last case — the one she tried to investigate while being too close to investigate clearly — changed her career and cost her more than money. It also made her one of the sharpest probate fraud investigators in Southern California, because she knew exactly what it felt like to be on the losing end.<br>​​​​​​​<br>Deanne's approach to her work was never purely procedural. She vetted clients before she took their cases, turning away those whose anger hadn't settled enough to serve them. She talked to guard dogs before walking past them. She entered locked facilities in a mental state she described simply as invisible — not a trick, not a costume, but a quality of attention that let her move through spaces unnoticed. She held membership in some of the most respected professional organizations in her field, among them the National Council of Investigation &amp; Security Services, the International Intelligence Network, the California Association of Licensed Investigators, and the Professional Investigators of California. Those affiliations connected her to a wide network of investigators across jurisdictions and borders, and reflected the scope of the agency she had built. She had also spent years in a study group led by psychic teacher Marsha, working to understand the mechanics of what she'd always done naturally, and to do it without needing fear or urgency as a trigger. She was still working on that part.<br>​​​​​​​<br>The Intuitive Investigator series grew from her case files and her conviction that the work mattered beyond the courtroom. Her investigations touched serious social issues — drug addiction, human trafficking, elder abuse — and her books were meant to inform and educate as much as to tell a story.<br><br>​​​They are not memoirs in the conventional sense. They are case files, in the best meaning of that phrase — accounts of what a woman found when she followed her instincts into the places facts alone wouldn't take her, and what the legal system, the human heart, and the stranger territories beyond both of them looked like from the inside. Deanne Acuña passed away suddenly, unexpectedly, and peacefully on November 26, 2018. She is deeply missed by her family, her friends, and the daughter who worked alongside her.<br><br>