Frozen Heat, by Richard Castle (aka a ghost writer)

Frozen Heat (Richard Castle)

Last Fall, while watching my weekly dose of The Voice on CTV, I discovered the network also brought in another great American show which was shown directly afterwards. I started watching ABC’s Castle on a regular basis and quickly fell in love with Richard Castle, the quirky crime novelist shadowing and assisting the homicide branch of the NYPD. Every case and every episode includes one or more than one of Castle’s imaginative and off-kilter hypotheses as to who committed or how the murder was committed. Like a real writer, anything is a possibility to him.

It’s hard for me to explain how thrilled I was to discover that ABC had hired a ghost-writer to transforms some of the works attributed to the fictional character Richard Castle into actual books published under his name. When I started reading Frozen Heat yesterday, I was not disappointed. The ghost-writer has managed to capture perfectly the voice of Richard Castle as I see him portrayed by actor Nathan Fillion in the TV show.

In this particular novel, characters Jameson Rook, a journalist, and Nikki Heat, a homicide cop, investigate the case of a woman found dead in a suitcase in the back of a freezer truck. Early on, connections between this murder and the murder of Nikki Heat’s mother, ten years earlier surface. Before they know it Rook and Heat, who are incidentally embroiled in romance, follow a lead which takes them from New York to Paris. Heat must dig into her mother’s past, while dodging attempts on her life and figuring out her relationship with Rook.

In the TV show, Richard Castle shadows detective Beckett and her team under the explanation that he is collecting ideas and doing research for his writing. It is explained that the character of Nikki Heat is based off of Becket and Rook is meant to be a version of Richard Castle himself. Knowing the plot line of the show and the plots of the various episodes adds even more credibility to this book. Events and characters are very reminiscent of the TV show. The reader can almost believe that Richard Castle is real, and that he really has been observing Beckett and the other NYPD officers to gain inspiration for his novels.

I’d say that enjoyment of this book is conditional. If you don’t know Castle, you won’t get all that there is to get about Frozen Heat, Jameson Rook and Nikki Heat. Go ahead and give the show a watch and then pick up one of the books in the Nikki Heat series. You won’t regret the hours you spend.