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I've been really enjoying Castle this season so when I saw Heat Wave by Rick Castle in the new releases at my local library, I thought, "Heck, why not?"
Given Heat Wave is the book written by the character Castle in the show, obviously the creators of the show are having some fun. I didn't expect great prose or even a great mystery but I expected to have some fun. I was even curious about the supposed sex scenes in the book that they talk about on the show.
The best part of the book?
You can hear Nathan Fillion and Stana Katic's voices saying the dialogue in the book.
Unfortunately, that's about all that is fun. I'm very glad I got the book from the library and didn't pay money for it.
The book plot is about finding out who tossed a multi-millionaire off his sixth floor balcony and onto the street below. The book starts (as the show often does) with Nikki Heat aka Beckett aka Stana Katic (this fiction within fiction is confusing), arriving at the crime scene. Castle, er, excuse me, Rook quickly joins the fun as they survey the crime scene, interview the trophy wife and the various business colleagues of the dead millionaire who turns out to be nearly broke as well as being dead.
This would probably make a decent, if unremarkable, episode of *Castle, *which depends a great deal on the banter and chemistry between the two lead characters. As prose, however, it falls down. The point of view frequently jumps from person to person without warning and that makes it hard to follow or hard to feel for any of the characters. The crime itself is boring and the ultimate bad guy is easy to spot. (In the show, he'd definitely be played by the best-known guest star.)
There is an excellent fight sequence in which a naked Nikki Heat fights a nasty brute in her apartment. The action is good though I don't buy Nikki walking around naked like that even after a bath during a heat wave. Too many peeping toms in New York City. No doubt Beckett would complain that Castle wrote Nikki naked because he liked it that way.
The promised sex scene is okay though not nearly as fun as the will they/won't they banter on the show. The heat, so to speak, on the show depends on the actors and the way they deliver the lines and sell the sexual tension.
Their doubly fictional selves are not nearly as interesting, sex or no sex.
It did leave me wondering who actually wrote the book. It reads like a revised screenplay of a Castle episode, so if I would have to guess, I'd say one of the show's staff writers. Maybe for the next one, they should get one of the writers at Castle's poker games to write it and put it in first person narration like many great detective novels such as Robert B. Parker's Spenser books. I certainly wouldn't object to hearing Fillion's voice in my head throughout the whole book.
