Saturday 9 October 2010

CBR2 Book 89: "Naked Heat" by Richard Castle

Publisher: Hyperion
Page count: 304 pages
Rating: 4 stars
Date begun: October 5th, 2010
Date finished: October 8th, 2010

NYPD detective Nikki Heat is not having an easy time doing her job. Her face is on every newsstand in the city after Jameson Rook's article printed, and made her far more famous than she would like to be. She is trying to forget all about the writer and his feature article after their break-up, but this proves impossible after she arrives at a murder scene to find New York's most vicious gossip columnist dead, and Jameson Rook is the person who found the body. Cassidy Towne was the subject of his next article, and he wants to team up with Nikki once again, to solve the murder, finish his article, and maybe get back into her good graces.

It turns out that there is nothing simple about the case. On the way to the morgue, Cassidy Towne's body is stolen, she had numerous enemies and was writing a tell-all book about the death of a high profile movie star - Heat is under pressure to solve the murder quickly and wants to stay out of the limelight while doing so. She wants nothing to do with Rook, but needs his insider knowledge about the murder victim to solve the case. And new bodies keep turning up.

Richard Castle is a fictional TV character played by Nathan Fillion. I have yet to discover who ghost writes these books, but the first Nikki Heat novel, Heat Wave, was an honest to God New York Times Bestseller. ABC has done an incredibly clever thing by having the novels published along side the TV show. Naked Heat is even better than the first novel, it's fast paced and entertaining, there is great banter between the characters, just like on Castle, and while I had certain aspects of the story figured out in advance, the murderer's identity and motive came as a surprise to me. I really want to figure out who actually writes these books, as I would happily pay money for other novels the person writes as well.

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