Anyone who’s watched the TV detective series ‘Castle’, featuring Nathan
Fillion as a writer tailing a NYPD cop solving murders, will know that
this is the book that featured in the show, the book that Castle the
character supposedly wrote as a result of his experience with the cops.
The joke, of course, is that the characters in the book are thinly
disguised copies of their TV show counterparts: Castle is Rook (a
Pullitzer-prize winning journalist this time, not a fiction writer),
Kate Beckett is Nikki Heat, sidekicks Esposito and Ryan are Ochoa and
Raley, pathologist Lanie is Lauren and so on. Except that this time, the
sexual tension between the two main characters is resolved in the
steamy sex scene on page 105 (as fans will surely remember from the
show).
As a murder mystery, this is a fairly run of the mill
affair, but it rattles along pretty well and the plot really isn’t the
point, after all. I found the overuse of slang and jargon a bit trying,
but it does fit with the character. A (fictional) writer researching a
book like this might very well accumulate a whole bunch of such phrases
and sprinkle them absolutely everywhere. And it’s very funny imagining
Castle writing this stuff. It seems like a hack piece of work, but then
that’s the intention, so it’s actually quite cleverly done. Not
recommended for anyone unfamiliar with the show, but for fans who would
likely get all the jokes and sly references, this is an entertaining
piece of fluff. Three stars.
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