Heat Wave

Heat Wave, by Richard Castle, 2009

This is such a hoot.  To begin with, Richard Castle doesn’t exist.  He is a character in a Television series, Castle.  Castle is an author and rides along with NYC Police Detective Kate Beckett, helping solve murders each week.  Castle has just published a new book (in the TV series) featuring Detective Nikki Heat and author Jameson Rook.  It has, not too surprisingly in this day of marketing while the iron is hot, simultaneously been published in real world print, electronic and audio book forms. Julie alerted me and I bought it.  This is what Amazon.com says about the author:

“Richard Castle is the author of numerous bestsellers, including the critically acclaimed Derrick Storm series. His first novel, In a Hail of Bullets, published while he was still in college, received the Nom DePlume Society’s prestigious Tom Straw Award for Mystery Literature. Castle currently lives in Manhattan with his daughter and mother, both of whom infuse his life with humor and inspiration.”

To make matters more confusing between TV show, fictional sleuth and real life, some of TV character Rick Castle’s poker-playing buddies are real people:  Stephen J. Cannell and author James Patterson, playing themselves.

So far the relationship between Rick Castle and Kate Beckett has not progressed farther than meaningful glances, though the sexual tension is plain.  The all time record for this non-hanky-panky, I’ve read, goes to Gunsmoke’s Miss Kitty and Marshall Dillon.

There is, to my astonishment, a lengthy and detailed ‘Acknowledgments’ section at the end of the story by the author.  These little behind-the-scene peeks into the fictitious author’s life and times feed our fantasy of actually knowing the person we welcome into our living rooms through the TV set.

And to end with, the book is popcorn reading at its lightest, sort of like a story idea for a cable TV series.  It’s a short book—I’m not exactly sure how short as I have only the Kindle version.  The first and only negative feature of Kindle I’ve come across is that you don’t have to close your hardcopy book to recharge it.

If you don’t follow TV shows, you won’t get the joke, but it’s fun for those of us who do.  I won’t spoil the fun by telling you the plot of Heat Wave… enjoy it for yourself.

Do you remember Y2K?

All our married life, whenever Jerry and any of his friends got together they played ‘end of the world’ games.  Sometimes the game carried over into real life, as during the Cuban missile crisis when Jerry dug a hole in the basement so we would have a place to cower behind earthen walls until the shock waves were over.  Then, of course, we planned to hose down the roof, to wash the radioactive dust away.  Over the years, other variations of this game were played.  In one, we planned to take a bolt-cutter to the armory down the road so we could steal heavy duty all terrain vehicles and flee to the hills with our loved ones and supplies.   Twenty-five or thirty years ago, Hank Reinhardt started putting in his two cent’s worth, and the plans became even more elaborate.  It didn’t matter what scenario was posited: nuclear war, total social and economic collapse, riots, civil strife, plague, famine–every possibility was covered.  Hank only hoped that when the balloon went up, he would not be too old to participate.

Thunderbolt!

Another week has gone by.  Tomorrow is Friday again already, and I may have another grandchild this weekend.  The one last weekend nearly killed me.  Kate saw a carnival (tacky rides, games and cotton candy) set up in a shopping center parking lot.  She said she had never been to a carnival.  Well, we couldn’t have that.  The grandgirls are way too over-protected as it is, so I told her we would go.

The Long Summer Vacation

It was a dark and stormy night…

It was the summer of 2001 or 2002, one of those rain-washed summers with frequent showers fueled by hurricane winds from the Gulf Coast.  Our daughter-in-law had gone to visit her mother in Texas, taking the grandchildren with her.  They had been gone for over six weeks.

Now, you must understand that we don’t have a lot of grandchildren, and for the only two we had to be gone so long was almost more than we could stand.  We were lonely… we were suffering granddaughter deprivation.  Our son came to supper most nights and after supper one evening, I announced, “They’ve been gone too long. I’m going to get them.”