This cop has to be the stupidest one around. Her writing style is horrible, at least 50% of her sentences start with "I" which has always been a no no. I will try another of her books before I give up but this book was ridiculous with her getting into one impossibly stupid situation after another. Any real cop would cringe reading this one. Really bad karma for her......drinking and stupid on top of it. Skip this one.

Big dissapointment. After reading a positive review about Scheigel being the best woman crime thriller writer, what I found was a hackneyed plot full of cliches and 2 dimensional characters. Bought two of her books and barely made it through one.

Samantha Mack is relieved of duty when she appears to have accidentally killed a fellow police officer. She is understandably distressed by the event, and for the next 150 pages or so she is either drunk or asleep. I also considered getting drunk or falling asleep when I became completely bored reading this novel. Samantha is also having an affair with her married boss, Sergeant Imes. Does the romance aspect spur your interest? Not really. Samantha keeps tab on Sergeant Imes' marriage by peeping in his kitchen window. She does this when she isn't looking into the window of the home belonging to the partner she shot. Does the peeping Tom part of the story get you excited? I don't think so.

Somewhere in the last third of the book the author tries once again to get you interested in the story by bringing in bad guys, and bad cops. Is Samantha's life in danger? I guess so, but I don't know if I really cared. As other reviewers have pointed out, the real mystery here is why this book is an Edgar Award Winner.

I'm usually pretty forgiving with books, even music and movies, but I couldn't let this one slip by. "Office Down" is just not written well. The main character is a mess of contradictions, claiming to keep her boyfriend (a married man) at a distance, but meanwhile we only see her throw jealous fits and play clingy games. We also hear from other characters that she's a good cop, but meanwhile she leaves footprints at a woman's house who figures out she was there, and she screws up left and right. The characters aren't written well, there's only one redeeming guy, and he's not in it much. And the actual plot/mystery only takes up about a third of the book. Most of the time is spent in the main character's head, listening to her whine and pity herself for no good reason.

There are also story threads that go nowhere and not much interesting happens. Pass on this book. You'll thank me.

The protagonist of this enjoyable novel is actually not very Nancy Drew-esque at all. Nope, Nancy never got this stuck on a guy (or spent this much time hanging around her apartment), except perhaps in Chelsea Cain's pastiche, Confessions of a Teen Sleuth.

I'll admit that Officer Down does strain one's credulity in spots (see retired Chicago police detective Ray Wilson's review herein for specifics), but its protagonist, Samantha Mack, is such an engaging narrator, it doesn't matter. What sets the story apart is its novel use of a died-in-the-cashmere female protagonist. I've certainly never read any hard-boiled genre fiction that dwells so much on gooey "relationship" stuff. It's a nice change, though once in a while it tried my patience, e.g.:

"I do have an idea about how love should be. And I deserve more."

But I don't want to give the wrong impression. Schwegel does a good job of rendering her Chicago setting in a believable way, and she also seems to be having fun with her feminine twist on Raymond Chandler's turf: "I put on some radio station that doesn't play sad songs, and I set out to forget what I can't remember in the first place."

There are a lot of gems like this in Schwegel's first novel, and I'm now encouraged to search out her second project. Very nicely done.

I read this in three days! Once I started, couldn't put it down.. GREAT BOOK!

There are two types of police/detective stories, the caricatures and the character developers. Schwegel's first novel falls squarely in the first category: jaded cops with thought patterns that can't make it past ten-words. Basically one-liner after one-liner, with nothing in character development and characters learning nothing. Why should the reader care? Think about it, with the story built around a female cop who has nothing to say and learns nothing, here we tacitly have the best argument against women in the police (and I suppose, implicitly the military too) - and by a woman, no less! To make matters worse, this one is a talkie, 75 pages of material expanded to 275. Critical editor badly needed. A fact checker needed too, based on the comments of another reviewer, an ex-Chicago cop.

So, Grafton, Paretsky, Schwegel - who else? All for the garbage can. Compare them with Donna Leon, a European for those who appreciate a little thought with their mystery.