As a fan of the TV series Castle, enough so that I watched through the entire run twice, I couldn't resist an opportunity to read Heat Wave, the first novel allegedly written by Nathan Fillion's eponymous character Rick Castle after his working relationship began with his NYPD muse, Detective Kate Beckett (Stana Katic).

Ghostwritten by screenwriter/novelist Tom Straw (who would go on to pen six more novels in the Nikki Heat series before handing the reins of the series over to someone else), the book strives to maintain the fiction that it's written by a real-life Rick Castle. The characters certainly are obvious reflections of popular series characters including detectives Kevin Ryan and Javier Esposito, police captain Roy Montgomery, medical examiner Lanie Parish and even Castle's flamboyant mother Martha Rodgers.

Surprisingly, the fictional Richard Castle, who in the series is a bestselling novelist, here is recast as Jameson Rook, a famous magazine journalist. It seems an odd choice, since the character in the TV series has a good reason to stick around for countless episodes because he's researching a series of novels, while the reporter needs only a single article from the experience.

He's paired with Detective Nikki Heat, Beckett's alter-ego, and he accompanies her on an investigation into a murder that rapidly evolves into three murders, as well as a high-stakes art heist. Like Castle in the show, Rook offers some keen insights into the case and, more often than not, gets in the way or gets on Heat's nerves. There's also a fair amount of sexual tension between them, just like in the show.

I always imagined the Nikki Heat books would read like the TV series, with the names changed, of course, but otherwise sounding like an expanded screenplay. Unfortunately, the snappy banter is nowhere near as clever, and the character interactions aren't as compelling. (Perhaps it is simply a testament to the actors' charisma and skill on screen that the dialogue in the book falls short of the mark.)

I didn't hate Heat Wave; in fact, I kind of enjoyed it. But it certainly didn't hook me like its TV counterpart did, and I'm not sure I'll be in a hurry to seek out the next book in the series.