LESLIE BRADFORD-SCOTT
Author • Entrepreneur • Part-time sleuth
The Truth is Rarely Simple.
The stories we inherit are a whole other crime scene.
The Liar’s Playbook
A memoir of family & crime • Simon & Schuster • May 5, 2026
I write about family secrets, survival, and the stories that get buried when the truth feels too expensive.
I grew up with a father who may have been running arms for the CIA or may have just been the world’s most committed liar. My memoir digs into the wreckage he left behind and the lies that kept my family afloat. âThe Liar’s Playbook is the real story of what happens when you finally stop protecting the people who hurt you. It is equal parts mystery, confession, and middle finger to generational silence.
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Preorders matter. If you’re rooting for late bloomers, truth tellers, or anyone who has ever crawled out of the wreckage and rebuilt from scratch, this is your moment to click.
GET THE BOOK â˘
About Leslie
Leslie Bradford-Scott is an award-winning writer who built Walton Wood Farm, a multimillion-dollar personal care company, from the wreckage of a life that needed rebuilding. She’s a late bloomer who writes about messy families, buried truths, and the strange ways reinvention sneaks up on us.
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Her work blends grit with dark humor because survival rarely comes with clean lines or tidy explanations.
Her memoir, The Liar’s Playbook, untangles two investigations:
Whether her father wasn’t the villain she believed, but a man doing whatever it took to keep his family safe. Or just a master storyteller.
How family secrets ricochet across generations and shape the stories we tell ourselves to survive
âShe writes for readers who understand that truth is complicated, memory is subjective, and resilience often sounds like sarcasm.
Invite Leslie to Your Book Club or Event
Leslie loves book clubs and events, mostly because they ask the questions no journalist has the nerve to. Bring her into your living room, library, or Zoom window for an unforgettable conversation about truth, lies, resilience, unreliable narrators, and what happens when family secrets refuse to stay put.
She’ll read, answer questions, spill what she can…
and politely sidestep the parts her lawyer said to avoid.