Mysteries, books, and television

Heat Wave - Richard Castle (Hyperion, 2009)

All Together Dead - Charlaine Harris (Ace Books, 2007)

This is how I spent my spring break.

One's a book from a series that created one of my favorite television shows (returning in June!) and the other was inspired from another show in my regular rotation. I'll start with Castle.

Okay, so Richard Castle (Nathan Fillion) is a successful mystery author who somehow manages to get permission to shadow a NYC homicide detective, who is a beautiful, tough yet vulnerable, blah blah blah, romantic tension. Anyway, the show is funny. Heat Wave is the first in his new Nikki Heat series, based on Det. Kate Beckett. Since it's such a great plot point on the show, I was highly amused when I saw (via Twitter, natch) that they actually published the "real" Heat Wave. (It's worth noting that the physical version, at 198 pages, is significantly slimmer than the tome that appears on the show.)

Since certain family members were dying to read it, and I was amused, I picked it up from the library. (The staffer at circulation was also excited, and actually yelped when she saw the pic of "Richard Castle" on the back cover.)

Oh, but the story itself. It's cute. It's not great, but it's cute, and I was entertained, particularly by all the extra-plot flourishes, like the blurbs and the dedication. Definitely for fans of the show only, but those folks will be amused.

.... And back to Sookie Stackhouse, heroine of this blog, so it seems. This, the 7th, might be my favorite installment of the series so far. It pushes along the grand narrative, and I've come to just put up with many of the quirks which I initially found annoying. And since it's been so long since True Blood was on the air, I'm finding it easier not to compare the two. I've almost been able to separate them into totally separate entities (like Gossip Girl, although I haven't actually read the books to compare).

This one actually had a quote that I enjoyed enough to note down. Sookie's a telepath, which has mostly been a problem until she started meeting supernatural beings, but she can't read vampires. So when she's in a room just with them, she realizes she has no idea what everyone else is thinking, and that this is what most of us deal with every day. She marvels, "How did regular people stand the suspense of day-to-day living?" How, indeed.