Book 10-11
Frozen Heat by Richard Castle
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
And barely a three star at that. To be fair, I'm not really the best audience for this as tie-in books are hit or miss for me. I think of this one as a three act book with the first and third being very weak.
It opens with me thinking if this is how bad Richard Castle writes he wouldn't be in that sweet NYC living space. It has an interesting enough crime, a woman in a freezer truck, dead and she has Nikki Heat's old suitcase stolen from the house when her mom was killed. That should have been an out of the park mystery for Nikki to solve. And yet somehow it remains dull until she and Jameson Rook head to France to track down her mother's footsteps because the newly dead woman was her mother's best friend for whom Nikki was named (and yet she's never heard of before).
It comes up with the most dramatic reason for Nikki's mom to have been murdered and that gives her a line of investigation. And it went well until it went flying over the cliff for the ending.
It has the typical 'Hollywood' ending, ridiculous action etc. What made me roll my eye is Nikki deciding she can't wait five minutes for Rook to do something and goes alone, without calling for back up or telling anyone where she went (though Rook could probably figure it out) and she goes into a dark, semi-abandoned subway station alone and naturally this works out as well as you'd suspect. For me this smacks of making the protagonist an idiot in order to increase drama and it never works for me.
In full disclosure, I got this in a library sale, would probably get another in a similar circumstance but can't imagine going out to purposefully find more. It just wasn't that interesting.
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Zeus: Conquering His Heart by Wendy Rathbone
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I ran across this one when the author had it as a freebie. It's a reimagining of Zeus's story. I will say I liked it better once we got to the halfway point. I didn't dislike the beginning far from it but one of the ways Zeus is shown to be a naive, eighteen year old boy with a lack of much of the knowledge he needs has him coming off as a bit on the whiny side.
Zeus cannot touch ground or his Titan father, Cronus will devour him as he has all of Zeus's siblings so he's raised by a nymph in basically a tree swing harness until he's eighteen and is finally taken to Eros, a primordial god (going with that version of the myth and not the one where he's Aprhodite's son) by Eros's Erotes, winged manifestations of various types of love. Zeus is overwhelmed by the soft luxuries and hedonism of Eros's Erotes as they teach him how he might best defeat Cronus (a bit much is made of this, the descriptions are lush but the whole section felt a bit long).
Zeus finds himself falling for Eros but he has a mission, go to Tartarus (hell/prison) and defeat his father. In this, there are surprises, trials and pain. Without spoiling much, you can imagine from the title how things end up for Zeus and Eros. Over all it's an enjoyable read.
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