The television show Castle is entertaining and managed to grow on me after a few episodes. This novel is the book written by the fictional Rick Castle character after his ride-alongs with the fictional Detective Beckett who serves as his inspiration. In this novel a wealthy New York real estate developer is thrown off of a balcony. As Detective Heat and her crew unravel the aspects of the killing they brush against the usual assortment of suspects, the trophy wife, the bookie, the bookie’s muscle, etc.
The meta fiction of the novel is entertaining and it is fun to hear echoes of the episodes in your noggin as you read the prose. But the story itself left me cold. On the show Castle is a bit cheesy but Nathan Fillion infuses the role with wit, charm, and humor. Here the cheese is dialed up to eleven with no performance to carry the material. The prose is entertaining, but it shows the effects of too much research, too much proving he did the homework, in short too much detective slang. I suppose if you consider that the novel was written in character, then that is pardonable, but it might be off-putting to mystery readers who had not seen the show. All in all, it’s a decent novel for something written by a fictional character.