Jerri Williams

Jerri Williams spent twenty-six years as a special agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, working primarily major economic fraud and corruption cases, and served as a media representative for the Bureau before retiring.

That combination of investigative work and public affairs is the reason her writing exists. As a spokesperson she spent years watching journalists, novelists, and screenwriters get the Bureau wrong and being largely unable to correct them, and the books and the podcast came out of that accumulated frustration.

She hosts the podcast FBI Retired Case File Review, in which she interviews former agents about the cases they worked. It has run to hundreds of episodes and functions as an oral history of the Bureau assembled from the people who were in it, which very little else does.

FBI Myths and Misconceptions: A Manual for Armchair Detectives, published in 2019, takes the twenty most common clichés about the FBI in books, television, and film and corrects each in its own chapter, supported by the Bureau's public information and by quotes from retired agents. It is written explicitly for writers, and its structural decision to end each chapter by assessing a real novel, film, or series against the fact is what makes the corrections stick.

The profiler material is the correction most novelists need. The popular image of an analyst who chases killers in the field and confronts the suspect derives from Thomas Harris and everything downstream of him, and the reality is analytical, mostly desk-based, and advisory.

She has also written crime fiction, including the Pagan Light and Greedy Givers series, drawing on the economic crime work that occupied most of her career.