From literature and novel characters private investigators have now become professionals that are more and more often looked for to solve many different cases.

Forget about the idea that you had of private investigators and that derived from the reading of novels or from a movie. Forget about Sherlock Holmes’ pipe and about his ancient clothes, as well as about the mishaps of the many James Bonds of them movies you might have seen. The figure of the private investigator, indeed, is much more ordinary than that, and what is even more important, the services of private investigators are not only requested to unmask a killer or to solve complicated international intrigues, but also to get to the bottom of more ordinary problems, concerning both the sphere of family and the world of work.

The cases that private investigators are asked to solve are of various kind, from the classic marital infidelity to the control of idle employees. In any case, the job of a professional of investigations is seen as necessary to find the truth and solve complicated situations. In the family sphere, for example, the problems that can be solved, or at least brought to light, by a private investigator concern both the relationship between husband and wife and between parents and children. If the private investigator that has been hired to unmask the unfaithful husband or the treacherous wife is a sort of classic, there is also an increasing number of parents’ requests to have children shadowed. With the help from a specialist in this field, parents aim at discovering what their children do when they are not at home, and probably not even at school. Therefore the job of a private investigator, in an time when the eyes and care of parents do not seem to be enough to control teenage children, is added to the job of mum and dad, who often do not have the time to follow their liar and idle child nor the capacity to keep under control all the sources of danger – real or virtual – that might bring kids to "perdition".

Other sector, same situation: also in the sphere of work the help of a good private investigator can be very useful. Private detectives are hired from companies to unmask idlers in suspicious poor health, who use the sick leave to go on holiday or to devote themselves to other jobs, sometimes for their company’s competitors. The work of investigators, in these cases, consists in controlling those people whose leaves are too frequent or suspicious and in proving their wrongdoing. Very often, in the case of employees that do not go to work to devote themselves to a second job, the fact is reported by their colleagues, and in this way they get investigations started. In this regard, in June the Italian Court of Cassation established the legitimacy of investigative actions ordered by employers to control potential wrongdoing of employees, unless the investigation concerns ordinary work activities.

These are only a few cases in which private detective agencies are involved, agencies that are becoming more and more useful in different sectors to solve many different problems.