This book was very disappointing. I was really looking forward to reading about this woman engineer in the Southwest. The idea is intriguing and the setting unusual. But Ms. Schumacher is not a good writer, even taking into account that this is her first book. The cliches are abundant and the characters are flat and sterotypical. There is the sexy cop, the bossy secretary, the typical sexists who give the spunky woman a hard time. The author's idea of character development is to give a cop a stutter. The original idea of having a woman engineer as the protagonist gets lost in the worn out devices used by the author.