Publisher's Blurb:
The bizarre murder of a parish priest at a New York bondage club opens Nikki Heat’s most thrilling and dangerous case so far, pitting her against New York’s most vicious drug lord, an arrogant CIA contractor, and a shadowy death squad out to gun her down. And that is just the tip of an iceberg that leads to a dark conspiracy reaching all the way to the highest level of the NYPD.
But when she gets too close to the truth, Nikki finds herself disgraced, stripped of her badge, and out on her own as a target for killers, with nobody she can trust. Except maybe the one man in her life who’s not a cop: reporter Jameson Rook.
In the midst of New York’s coldest winter in a hundred years, there’s one thing Nikki is determined to prove: Heat Rises.
I’m not what you’d call the biggest fan of novelizations, especially when it comes to TV shows. No matter how much I love the Stargate shows or Babylon 5, I just can’t get into the books. I think that a lot of the problem lies in the fact that I have higher expectations of books than I do cinema. But the more spin-off books I pick up, with the exceptions of a few Star Wars authors, the lower my expectations for them as genre plunges. So while I was willing to drop a copy of Heat Rises in my $2 bag from a library sale, it took months for me to actually work up to reading it.
But it was amazing.
I’d read Heat Wave out of amusement when it first came out and got little more out of it than a few grins at allusions to the show. But Heat Rises read like a true detective novel. A few tie in elements still seemed forced (ie Roach) but otherwise, I felt like the characters and the plot had finally taken on a life of their own apart from their equally fictional counterparts. The plot deviated enough from the show that I found myself becoming more intrigued and less certain of where it was heading.
On a truly nitpicking level, I though the physical book had improved too. Still not the weighty tome being handed around on the show, but it has more heft and a better overall size than Heat Wave.
At this point, I’m definitely interested in seeing where the books go as their own independent series. Particularly after the alternative conclusion the author presented, I feel that there may be life in “Nikki Heat” apart from and reaching beyond the TV show.