ABC has always done some interesting marketing, and usually if there’s a product to be made from a show they’ll do it, the results however are usually mixed.  Take for example Bad Twinby the fictional Gary Troup, a novel meant to be a tie in to Lost (the author was supposedly killed in the crash of flight 815 and in one episode Sawyer can be seen reading the manuscript for the book).  That novel crashed and burned as even the producers of the show disowned it.  So although it made sense for them to release a book written by a character on a show about a writer, I approached this with trepidation.

 

I am in fact weary of any sort of television tie-in novel.  I think they’re pretty horrible things that mostly have nothing to do with or contain the feel of the source material.  They’re just writers who bought some licensing rights and who are borrowing names and characters from an already established universe.  They usually suck.

 

Heat Wave actually has a really interesting premise.  It is by the main character of the show “Castle” and is actually a book in the show.  It’s the book he writes in the show.  So the plot is centered around a loose fictional version of all the characters in the show.  The lead in the book is Nikki Heat, who is representing Stana Katic’s character on the show, and she’s being followed around by a journalist called Jameson Rook, representing Nathan Fillion’s character.  It’s all sort of meta and if you watch the show it makes more sense (if you don’t watch the show, why not?).

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Castle is one of those shows that it would be easy to miss.  In a tv landscape oversaturated with procedurals of every kind, one more little cop show airing Mondays at 10pm on ABC is certainly easy to skip right over.  It’s not the most advertised show, and it started midseason last year (well this year but we’re talking tv years here).  But there’s plenty of reasons to be watching it and skipping over some of the lamer contenders in the category.

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