Brief Book Review: A Brewing Storm

Full disclosure, I have not been reading much lately. I have been trying to read We Bought a Zoo all summer and have yet to finish it. However, this past Thursday at work was absolutely dead and of course I forgot my book, so I downloaded the Kobo app onto my phone and started reading A Brewing Storm by Richard Castle. Yes the character from the TV show Castle (which is an awesome show btw and if you haven't yet, you should watch it :) haha).

It's a really short book, a novella? I guess. I don't know book terms (my sister would but she's currently driving herself from St Catharine's so perhaps when she gets here I'll ask her). I also don't know exactly how long the book is, because the Kobo only tells you pages in chapters. All I know is it was short (and I was bad and stayed up late reading it). And my sister has arrived and I was right, it's a novella.

So here's the description from Chapters (it's only available as an ebook).

When Derrick Storm needed to leave the CIA, he couldn't just retire. He had to fake his own death. So when his former boss calls in an old favor that will bring Storm out of early retirement and back to Washington to investigate a high-profile kidnapping, he knows there must be more at stake than the life of a senator's son. Working alongside, but not exactly with, bombshell FBI investigator April Showers, Storm must make sense of a confusing flurry of ransom notes and a complicated web of personal relationships and international politics. He'll get to the bottom of the kidnapping, but the storm is still brewing . . .

I was pretty excited to finally get to read about Derrick Storm, since they talked about the books so much in the show. Like I said it was a pretty short book, but it was still pretty good (minus a few grammatical and continuity errors that I noticed because I'm weird like that). The story ends with a bit of a cliff hanger, which I find weird because I think if they weren't going to wrap up the story in this novella, they might as well just made it one big novel.

Throughout the book you see little things that help you figure out the case. I managed to figure out half of it before the end of the book (and they still don't really tell you the other half before it finishes). I'm not saying this is a bad thing, I actually think it's kind of fun when they give you enough that you can actually try and solve the case before they do.

I thought the characters were alright, we didn't learn too much about Derrick's past or why he "died", but they also seemed to have some really weird names. The plot seemed to move well, but still managed to get everything in that needed to be there.

All in all I enjoyed this book, if you like a short crime story definitely check it out. If you like Castle you should definitely check it out as well, and his other Nikki Heat books (Heat Wave, Naked Heat, Heat Rises, Frozen Heat, and coming out September 17th is Deadly Heat). There are two more shorts in this trilogy, A Raging Storm (which I actually just started reading today) and A Bloody Storm as well as a full length novel Storm Front.

So stay tuned for my review of the rest of the Storm books, and more misadventures.