Kurt R.A. Giambastiani

I have often said, “Every book has its own lesson to teach, even the bad ones.”

Okay…now you’re looking off to the right and seeing the cover for the latest Richard Castle book and you’re thinking…”Oooh, guess he didn’t like that one.”

Wrong.

I liked it fine. It’s a tie-in, meta-reality, police procedural mystery, and as such, it worked just fine. It’s not high art or lasting literature, but it’s a fun read, and filled with all the little “Castle” and “Firefly” jokes that come from this clever and, dare I say, unique confluence of reality and fiction.

However, it wasn’t perfect, and through its imperfections, I learned something as a writer.

I love this series, and I do not like mysteries, as a rule.

Like the previous “Nikki Heat” books, this novel fast-paced, light on its feet, and capable of delivering a few unforseen plot twists. The plot itself is intricate enough to keep the reader engaged, without becoming murky (something at which the meta-plot in NBC’s “Castle” sometimes fails). Also like all the previous books, it is ghosted as if written by the fictional Richard Castle, character of the TV show (played by Nathan Fillion), and includes all sorts of references and shout-outs to events in the show, events that (if you play along) the character Castle experienced, and which therefore become fodder for his writing.

This conceit—that a fictional character is writing books—is unique in my experience. It’s clever and it adds a layer of enjoyment as I roll with the punch lines. This is the fourth “Nikki Heat” book; one book comes out each season the show airs, and sometimes the real-life launch of the book is on the same night the book launches on the TV show. It’s a wonderfully interwoven example of storytelling.

However, it is not a perfect book, and I learned from it in two ways.

First, I see examples of a rush to publication. I don’t know why, but this book stands out with a rather large collection of odd, misshapen, or genuinely unparsable sentences. One sentence I went over five times before I gave up, figuring that something had been removed or dropped. This means that the galley proofs…weren’t…as it’s the kind of error that can easily happen during typesetting, but it may just be due to a last-minute rush or some slap-dash editorial changes foisted upon the book in reaction to recent plot elements in the show or current events in real-life.

Second, there’s a distinct sloppiness in the writer’s/writers’ use of the limited omniscient viewpoint. I discussed my own views/use of the limited omniscient voice earlier, and this book makes mistakes that help me prove my own rule.

One scene in particular stood out. Both the two main characters (Detective Nikki Heat and author Jameson Rook) are in the scene, and we start with Heat’s point-of-view, in which the narrator doesn’t know what Rook is thinking, and then we switch over to Rook’s POV, wherein the narrator doesn’t know what Heat is thinking. This would not have jolted me out of the story if it had been done in total omniscient viewpoint, where the narrator knew the minds of all, though the characters did not, but it wasn’t. It was done in two jarring, separate, juxtaposed paragraphs of limited omniscient view (at one point, the author switches back and forth inside a single paragraph), and it just made me blink and re-read.

Perhaps I’m super-sensitive to this error. As a writer, when I read I always have a little writer-demon on one shoulder, pointing to clunkers and saying “Oooh, that was a bad one.” Of course, I also have a little writer-angel on the other shoulder, pointing to wonderful turns-of-phrase and saying, “Oooh! I wish I’d written that!” (Yes, it gets confusing in my head at times.)

Overall, I recommend the book, especially to fans of either “Castle” or “Firefly.”

k