This series has lost the fun.

I alllllmost two-starred this fucker. For about the first 2/3 of it, I was actively bored. Halfway through, I actually returned it to the library and didn’t expect to pick it back up for a while. Somebody else had a hold on it, so I couldn’t renew it. But it turns out whoever had that hold either didn’t care enough to actually pick the book up, or returned it almost immediately because they didn’t like it. I can sympathize with that. And it got the book back to me very quickly, so. Hey. Who’s complaining.

There are lots of little problems in this sixth installment of the meta-tie-in Nikki Heat series, penned by “Richard Castle,” as a fun but savvy marketing ploy to fans of the TV show Castle. But the main problem is that the book, which takes place in the week leading up to, during, and after Hurricane Sandy, and yet it might as well have taken place anywhere or anywhen else for all that signified in the plot. I mean, my God, what a WASTE. Basically there were only two scenes that utilized the hurricane effectively, and they were very brief.

All the other problems I can sum up by saying that it feels like this ghostwriter (or maybe ghostwriters?) has stopped having fun with writing this series. It felt like a chore to read it, I can only imagine how it must have felt to write it. It doesn’t help that the plot has Nikki freaking the hell out and acting stupid and paranoid for half the book and she was almost intolerable to read about. But really, it was just uninteresting for the most part. Towards the end as all the plot threads came together it picked back up again and actually managed to hold my interest for the rest of the book, which is why I’m rounding my two stars up to three, and why I’m going to continue the series for at least one more book. (This was not something I planned on doing the first time I returned it to the library.)

[2.5 stars]