Book Review: Suzie Ivy’s “Bad Luck” makes good reading!

I read a goodly portion of Bad Luck Cadet & Bad Luck Officer: A True-Life Adventure by Suzie Ivy (2012) while waiting for and riding airplanes.  Originally written as posts for her blog, they are nicely divided into readable chunks.  Thus, they turned out to be perfect for a day punctuated by multiple interruptions.

But I am here to testify that they also can be as addictive as popcorn if you have a longer stretch of time.

Suzie Ivy is a natural writer with a great sense of humor and terrific stories to tell.  Although she desperately needs a proofreader, I found her true-life adventures both fascinating and highly readable.

Her saga begins at the age of 44, when a riding accident lands her in bed with a broken hip.  In pain and facing a midlife crisis, she spotted an ad on a drugstore bulletin board.  Her hometown, which she refers to as Small Town, Arizona, was seeking police academy candidates for a class to begin six months later. 

Not everyone—okay, almost no one—would have seen this as an opportunity for a  44-year-old woman who was 40 pounds overweight and had a broken hip, but it rapidly becomes clear that Suzie is not “everyone.”  

Through her blog posts, she takes her readers along with her to the Police Academy, and when she miraculously (her word) survives to graduate, we then get to ride along for the start of her career as a “midlife police officer” in Small Town.  And what a ride it is.

I ran across her “Bad Luck Detective” blog when researching police-related blogs for my novel.  I ordered the book to gain some badly-needed insights.  Started reading for research, and by page two I was hooked as a reader, too.

If you are interested in reading about police work—or, quite frankly, if you are interested in a great story about the triumph of the human spirit—buy and read this woman’s books.  The link I’ve attached is to her Amazon page, where both print and Kindle versions are available.

This is the first of several “Bad Luck” books she apparently means to write and publish through her Bad Luck Publishing company. I’m looking forward to reading them, just as soon as they are available.