My instincts were dead on. The story itself was great: The book opens with a police officer being brought into the ER and a quick decision made to perform brain surgery. It then leaps back in time to how Russ Reiker became a Phoenix police officer, what his rookie years were like, and how he grew into a great cop. Police officers enjoy ongoing pranks, and Reiker wasn't innocent of playing practical jokes, one-upping his fellow officers.
One of the most poignant parts of this book was the story of Ben, who was also a cop and had taken rookie Reiker under his wing. The two became best friends. The author details this friendship well and when Ben is killed on duty, the reader feels the loss Reiker must have experienced. Unable to fully recover, Reiker became a school cop and found meaning in his work again. Tragedy hit a second time, when two months before retiring, he collapsed on a playground, bringing the story full circle to the emergency room scene.
Because she was part of the police family, Marfino- Reiker had some extraordinary insight into the Blue Brotherhood. She did a nice job explaining it and describing the solidarity it inspires in times of trouble. She also shared the frustrations officers face with lame calls, shift work, the bureaucracy within a department, and social programs that don't work.
Like I said, the story was really good. The execution, on the other hand, was awful. I found this description on Amazon: "With the release of her first book, 999 Officer Down, Catherine Marfino- Reiker established herself as a master of non-fiction." I would have to fervently disagree. There were mid-sentence tense changes, and she frequently hopped from first person to second, then to third. I found it a bit disorienting to read. Odd wording, misplaced commas, and illegally used apostrophes ran rampant throughout the book. Sigh.
The ending was a letdown, too. The "life-threatening injury" Reiker received on duty is never fully explained. After assuming from the jacket copy that it was something like a gunshot or stabbing-things one would expect a cop to encounter on the job-I discovered it was a medical condition (never fully explained) that send Reiker to the pavement, where he banged his head hard enough to kill him.
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