P.D. James once said, “What the detective story is about is not murder but the restoration of order.” Ah, Ms. James, meet Adrian Monk.
Lee Goldberg’s new TV tie-in novel for the popular series character MONK is another winner for those who can’t get enough of the obsessive-compulsive police consultant. In MR. MONK AND THE BLUE FLU, a series of female joggers has been found strangled along various park paths. In each case, their left shoe has been taken. In the first few pages, Monk is at the scene, examining the latest corpse from a distance using binoculars. He can’t get any closer because the woman has been killed in a dog park, and as he notes, even if he can’t see any dog excrement, the ground is literally impregnated with the offending organic material. Good ol’ Monk.
Right off the bat, Monk makes a few inspired deductions akin to Sherlock Holmes noticing the smallest details, and we’re deep into the case. But there’s another problem: The San Francisco Police Department is going on an illegal strike, hence the “blue flu” in the book’s title. In the end, many of the detectives and supervisory personnel call in sick.
An enraged mayor calls in Monk and offers him a job as captain of the Homicide Division. Monk’s faithful assistant, Natalie Teeger, knows this is a bad decision because by taking the job, Monk will become a scab in the eyes of all his cop friends. But Monk is so happy to be reinstated to the force that he accepts. And soon, he is saddled with a team of detectives recently fired from the force for mental issues – a group of people somewhat damaged like Monk and still trying to make sense out of their lives.
It’s a little contrived and extremely unlikely, but one reads these books more for the character details than anything else. You can just see Tony Shalhoub (the actor who plays Monk on the television show) say and do the things Goldberg has written – which makes sense, since Goldberg writes episodes for the show as well. And while Monk is truly wacky, Goldberg never belittles the character, instead treating him with a bemused tenderness. He does this while still making us laugh out loud over Monk’s antics and the difficulties of his assistant.
A must-read if you enjoy Monk’s mysteries on the tube. –Mark Rose
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OTHER BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF THIS AUTHOR:
• DIAGNOSIS MURDER: THE PAST TENSE by Lee Goldberg
• MR. MONK GOES TO THE FIREHOUSE by Lee Goldberg
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