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.