Review: A great follow-up to "Bad Luck Cadet"
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 06 17, 2012
After reading Suzie Ivy's fascinating account of her grueling 18-week session at the Arizona police academy ("Bad Luck Cadet"), I felt compelled to read her sequel, "Bad Luck Officer," which detailed her first year as the first and only female officer on a small town police force. As heavy as the odds were against even a physically fit young man making the grade, they were astronomically higher for an overweight, middle-aged woman recovering from a broken hip.Her experiences as a rookie cop ranged from hilarious (corralling a runaway beefalo - a "one-ton devil with horns") to heartbreaking (finding the body of a woman who had been repeatedly beaten by her husband). I should mention that I don't watch a lot of TV, but one of my favorite shows is "Cops." "Bad Luck Officer" is "Cops" plus all the behind-the-scenes stuff, like Suzie's relationships with her fellow officers as well as her family.It was an eye-opening experience for Officer Ivy to learn very quickly that her small Arizona town had the same kind of crimes as the big cities, including drunk drivers, drug dealing, domestic violence, child abuse, and perhaps most sickening - child molestation. Ms. Ivy narrated her experiences very simply with no attempt to hide her emotions, which made her memoir a very warm, very personal story.I learned a lot of cool cop trivia, such as why many cops hate the popular TV show "CSI" (not realistic - in real life, lab tests often take weeks to come back) and why some cops read the Miranda rights from a card (no chance for errors which could get a case thrown out of court). The book is full of police procedural stuff, which I found to be fascinating.Some of Officer Ivy's cases were pretty mundane, as you'd expect, but some were unique, including the man who mistreated his dog, with the dog finally having had enough and biting off the man's... well, it was an appendage that he would sorely miss, and that's all I'll say about that, except that I'm still laughing/groaning at the mental image of Officer Ivy using her flashlight to search the man's backyard for said missing appendage."Bad Luck Officer" was marvelous reading, and now I'm looking forward to Suzie Ivy's promised next book, "Bad Luck Detective."