One of Jamie and my guilty pleasures lately has been the TV series Castle, where the mystery writer Richard Castle works with a NYPD detective Kate Beckett and writes books about an alter ego writer who works with a vamped-up version of Beckett named "Nikki Heat".
Jamie and I were in a bookstore in the Atlanta airport on the way back from Russia and saw this book and couldn't resist. I downloaded it on the iPad and she got the paperback and we are both thoroughly enjoying it. It is really, really fun to read these tweaked-up version of the characters on the series, all the while enjoying thinking how clever Castle thinks his writing is, and how pissed Beckett is at being the inspiration for Nikki Heat. Her reaction to the book (in an episode I haven't seen yet) is “There’s plenty to the character. She just needs a better writer" which is a great example of the back and forth the characters have, and what we really enjoy about this show. She's not always the hard-boiled detective, and Castle is frequently not the "ruggedly handsome" debonair writer. In fact, his insecurity and goofiness is what sets off her exasperation, which is what's so much fun to watch. I tell Jamie the reason I like watching them is that it's a less-tired version of the exasperated looks I get from her on a daily (often hourly!) basis. Fun, fun.
The writing in the book is spectacular, by the way, slightly tongue in cheek and always just half a step short of being over the top, which is exactly what a fictional fiction book needs. We are really enjoying it, and if you like the series, I recommend it highly. Standing alone it's middling cheesy crime fiction, but when you realize that's the joke, it makes it really funny. It's really not unlike a Mystery Science Fiction Theater 2000 (or whatever it was called) because you get to heckle the book as it goes along behind the "real" characters are doing it as well.