Heat Wave

Heat Wave
Unknown Staff Writer, 2009

Premise: This licensed tie-in book is ostensibly the novel written by the character Castle on the show of the same name. The plot follows a murder investigation about a rich man pushed off a high balcony.

This book did amuse me a little, but mostly it was unintentional. It's funny that a lot of people bought this short, throw-away book. It's funny that some ghost writer got paid to crank this out over a weekend. It's funny that any editors or producer types gave this a pass to be put into production.

I know, I know, it's a novel created for the sole purpose of exploiting the TV show's fanbase. I am a fan of the show. I wasn't expecting brilliance. I was, however, hoping for competance. So sue me.

This is a somewhat spectacularly bad book, although not quite so bad for me to think that it might be bad on purpose.

My biggest problem with it is the terrible use of tie-ins to the show. If this were a stand-alone novel, it could merely be brushed off as hackneyed and boring. However, it isn't as though the author just took inspiration from the show- make Nikki sound a bit like Beckett, use a couple references, that sort of thing. It felt sort of like an episode, except that the plot was incredibly boring. I mean, I literally thought it was an episode that I had seen, but that had been rewritten badly. I checked the episode list, though, and I can't remember which one I'm thinking of. All of the main characters have terribly caricatured one-to-one correspondences. I couldn't take the book seriously for even a fraction of a second because I kept picturing how fast Castle would have been dropped by all of his officer friends the moment the book came out, because of how horribly they are all portrayed.

So, in conclusion: Boring, trite, and poorly connected to its source material. However, it skirts close to so bad it's funny.

1 star - Didn't Like It.