by JULIET WATERS

New Year's Eve, 1999. It seems like eons since that year when we were worrying about Y2K, discovering Napster and watching the first episodes of reality TV. In Spy Girl: True Adventures from My Life as a Private Eye, Amy Gray, like many people, spent the evening at home with a couple of good friends - in her case, pals from her days studying at Brown. Unlike many people, or Brown graduates, Gray was about to start a new job as a P.I.

Judging from a piece in New York Magazine that has her modelling a bubblegum-pink trench coat, Gray is a gorgeous California blonde. A "hide-a-Jew," as her new boss labels her, and sexy in a Carrie Bradshaw, pack-a-day-smoker way. The investigative firm she worked for is referred to here only as The Agency, but don't expect Alias. Gray's Agency reminds me of the bike courier company I worked for just after I got my BA. Her work there didn't seem to have been much more interesting, and it was definitely less action-packed. Gray's job consisted largely of running people's names through Google until she got a bit of dirt on them, then following up with an interview or two to confirm that the person being investigated was at least shady, if not a full-blown con artist.

Her fellow private dicks were hardly Cameron Diaz or Lucy Liu either. There's Noah, "a scrawny, pale-faced kid who had a master's degree in British Renaissance politics," who was also a former child actor on the Nickelodeon classic, Hey Dude! There's Matt, better known as Assman because of an anal abscess so deep that after surgery he was left with a "built-in butt pouch in which he sometimes keeps his keys." There's Nestor, a 4-foot-9 art school dropout who had a brief period of glamour as an undercover investigator whose work led to the indictment of Peter Gatien (the club owner in the recent movie Party Monster). There's Evan, the highest-ranking investigator, whose usual workday uniform is the standard indie-boy twin set of Superchunk T-shirt and long-sleeved thermal. His evening wear, however, tends toward zebra striped G-string, as Amy discovers when she spots him stripping at Cake, the women-organized erotic soirée, described here as "the nerd version of The Playboy Mansion."

Spy Girl is a great trip down memory lane, harking back to the days when the worst thing that could happen was being dumped by someone who's deepest dream was to be on The Real World. For Gray, this Jill job was at least a step up from her last job working as the "assistant (read: slave) to two top New York book editors (read: frustrated writers who have watched their friends get rich on the NASDAQ while they struggle to maintain summer shares in Southampton.) Fortunately the dreariness is relieved by a social life that makes Sex and the City look relatively lame, and there are priceless anecdotes, such as the one about a friend being stalked by David Blaine.

Defying expectations created by the hot-pink cover and chic-lit title, Gray is a surprisingly strong writer. She's no Graham Greene, and the ending of her light but entertaining memoir is unforgivably trite. However, few readers are going to accuse her of slumming it. Despite a vulnerability for some pretty lame men, she's obviously a tough girl. In the old days they would have called her a broad. One of those women whose quick wit and hard vices mean she doesn't have to waste much time proving herself to men, or anyone. Her eye for detail and instinct for authenticity makes this a fun, easy and occasionally insightful read with a lot of great quotes. My favourite from Franz Kafka: "Everyday life is the greatest detective story ever written. Every second, without noticing, we pass by thousands of corpses and crimes."

Spy Girl: True Adventures From My Life as a Private Eye by Amy Gray, Villard, PB, 217pp, $19.95