The premise here seemed a bit too Murder, She Wrote to me -- the protagonist goes somewhere and someone he meets just happens to die. I guess it's acceptable, though, since the talk-show host was specifically hoping to solicit Castle's help, so he could've arranged to book Castle for just that reason. That makes it less of a coincidence. Still, after the earlier episode where the husband-to-be of the ex-love-of-Castle's-life was murdered, it's nudging a li-i-ittle close to Jessica Fletcher territory.
I'm glad there wasn't as much bouncing between suspects as usual; instead a lot of the detective work was about, first, determining whether it was a murder, and after that, trying to reconstruct the victim's activities and find out where and when he was poisoned. That was a nice break from the formula.
Unfortunately, it was a very easy mystery to solve. As soon as they showed that Mann had crossed out "boys" in his signoff line in favor of more gender-neutral alternatives, I knew it meant he was going to ditch Fred Willard and that that was a motive for murder. And the longer Beckett and Castle went without addressing that clue, the clearer it became that my conclusion would turn out to be right. That's a problem with this show's writing sometimes -- the characters overlooking an obvious clue in order to stretch out the mystery to an hour. It doesn't make them look good when they spend several days in-story before catching onto something that the viewer sees instantly.
How many times has Fred Willard played a talk show co-host? That was the very first role I ever saw him in, as Martin Mull's co-host on Fernwood 2 Night way back in 1977.
I just bet the July release date they mentioned for the paperback of Heat Wave is the real release date. I wonder if there's any chance they'd actually make a movie out of it. It'd be a bit redundant, but it'd score points for commitment to the metafiction.
