As Joanna Brady makes the shift from Candidate to Sheriff, Jance takes us on a quick-and-dirty primer of police procedure. Attending the Arizona Police Officers Academy (APOA) so she can hold her own with her more-experienced law enforcement staff, Brady finds herself struggling to keep up with classwork, coping with changes in her familial network (the recent loss of her husband, among other things), dodging Cupid's arrows, and trying to keep an innocent man from throwing his life away. And then a homicidal maniac starts stalking her.
Shoot/Don't Shoot has a very convoluted structure, with Jance keeping half a dozen plot lines running at any given time. At times the book was a bit angsty for my taste, and the final few chapters seemed plot-driven, rather than developing as a result/consequence of choices the characters made. It diminishes the quality of the book slightly, but with so much taking place in the novel she can't dwell on any one thing for long.
The "mysteries" in the book aren't that complex. Granted you don't know the name of the serial killer until the end, but you can make some pretty accurate ballpark guesses about his identity. There are also some odd details about the APOA facility that seemed fairly obvious; Jance does a fairly good job using them to enhance the suspense, though. Other details, however, are hidden so obviously in plain sight that I found myself getting irritated that Brady wasn't paying any attention to them.
If you haven't read any of Jance's Sheriff Joanna Brady mysteries, this would be an okay place to start. It brings you up to speed fairly well with the events of the first two books in the series, without straying far from its own storyline in the process. On the other hand, if you don't deal well with blatant melodrama, you might want to get to know Joanna under less stressed circumstances so you're already invested in her character before reading this at-times-frustrating book.