Review: Naked Heat

Naked Heat by Richard Castle

My rating: 2 of 5 stars



A fictional book written by a fictional character. I enjoyed it at about a three-star level, but that was only because I watch Castle. Because I already had the majority of characters and settings in my head, I read the book as if I were watching an extended episode of the show. I was able to glean nuance from having seen it in previous episodes, so I knew what a glance between Ochoa/Esposito/Jon and Raley/Ryan/Seamus looks like (book character/TV character/actor) and I'm not convinced that the writing alone could have conveyed all that depth.
I did, of course, enjoy all the levels of meta. There was a beautiful reference to the character that the actor who plays the character that wrote the book (upon whom the main character is based) played in a different show. I wanted to try writing that all out without directly naming anybody to see how convoluted it got (with names - the book references Malcom Reynolds, who was a character on Firefly played by Nathan Fillion, who plays Richard Castle who supposedly wrote this book, which contains a thinly-veiled self character named Jameson Rook).
I was tickled to see the "author's note" from Richard Castle at the end of the book thanking both the Castle-show characters and the actors who play them (as well, I'm guessing as producers and writers, but I don't know their names well enough to recognize them). Reality and fiction merge!!
I might read another, but I won't go out of my way to do it.



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