About the book
One man spent forty years doing the work. The other made sure it did not stay in a drawer.
The field source
David Shackelford worked as a private investigator for more than forty years, most of them spent on insurance fraud: workers' compensation claims, staged accidents, arson fires, and surveillance jobs that sometimes ran a year or longer, much of it across the rural South and Appalachia.
He ran undercover operations out of bars, pool halls, and job sites, built pretexts that held up under pressure, and made a specialty of being the guy nobody remembers seeing. He is retired now.
The field reports in the Playbook are his, told in his own words and preserved word for word.
Every case in the book is drawn from Shackelford's own closed files. The reports were written contemporaneously, for the carrier, as part of the work — not reconstructed afterwards for a reader. That is the difference between a war story and a record.
Names, carriers, and identifying details are removed. What remains is the method: what was observed, what was documented, and what the documentation had to survive.
The author
Andrew Bouse is a writer, independent publisher, and software developer. Most of his projects start the same way: someone has knowledge worth keeping, and no good container exists for it yet.
The Insurance Investigator's Playbook began with a manuscript from a retired private investigator who spent more than forty years working insurance fraud cases. The stories were remarkable, and they were sitting in a drawer. Bouse organised them into a working manual, kept the investigator's accounts word for word, and built the tradecraft instruction around them. Every statute and state-by-state legal table was verified against current law before publication.
This is the manual the field source wishes someone had handed him in 1982. Getting it onto paper was the point.
Who it is for
Claims professionals, SIU investigators, and adjusters. New private investigators deciding whether the career is for them. Adjusters who hire PIs and need to know what good surveillance product looks like. Fraud examiners in training.
It assumes you already know what a claim is, and skips the introduction that most investigation books spend a third of their length on.
It is not legal advice, and it does not tell you how a claim in front of you should be decided. Insurance investigation is regulated differently in every jurisdiction, and the chapter on ethical lines exists precisely because the boundaries matter more than the techniques. The compliance page sets out the sourcing and the limits in full.
Sources: David Shackelford's original field reports and case files, 1980s–2020s, all closed matters. Last reviewed: 12 August 2026.