It was bad news/good news for MONK fans as 2009 came to a close. The bad news, of course, is that USA Network aired the final episode of the popular cable series this December. But the good news is that the same month marked the arrival of MR. MONK IN TROUBLE, the latest novel in this consistently entertaining tie-in series by Lee Goldberg. Perhaps knowing that fans might suffer from withdrawal, the author has cleverly figured out a way to provide readers with more Monk for their money.

Adrian Monk and his loyal assistant, Natalie Teeger, are sent to the California town of Trouble to investigate the murder of the security guard at the Gold Rush Museum. Crime — especially of the violent variety — is rare in this tiny tourist town. But the murdered guard was once a San Francisco cop, so the killer might be one of the many criminals he previously arrested.

When Monk and Natalie begin their investigation, they each discover two distractions that they find irresistible. For Monk, it’s the 1962 train robbery that made the town famous, but whose loot of stolen gold was never recovered. And an unsolved crime to Monk, even one as old as this, is an imbalance that simply must be restored.

For Natalie, however, it is the discovery, courtesy of the town’s historical society, of one Artemis Monk, the town’s assayer who had an uncanny talent for solving crimes, as well as a collection of personal quirks that today we would call obsessive-compulsive disorder. Artemis Monk’s various adventures were recorded in the diary of his faithful assistant, a local widow named Abigail Guthrie.

Natalie is convinced that the man is a direct family ancestor of her boss. But Monk is neither convinced nor interested; he’s too busy trying to solve both the mystery of Trouble’s missing gold and the murder of the museum guard. And anyway, the little town’s efforts to retain the ambiance of its historical past — with its unpaved roads and burros wandering the streets — is enough to drive the clean-freak Monk stark raving mad!

Once again, Goldberg expertly sails along the fine line of character quirks that make Monk so infuriating, and yet so endearing. His obsessions with order and cleanliness are on full display here. As usual, they are enough to make you want to give up on him completely and leave him to his scrubbing and reorganizing (as the long-suffering Natalie has often done). But, again as usual, Goldberg balances these irritations with enough reassuring humor and sheer crime-solving fun that you find yourself cheering for Monk by the conclusion.

But, wait — there’s more! The author includes several excerpts from Guthrie’s recollections of Artemis Monk and the crimes he solved in the old days of Trouble. These serve as full-fledged short stories within the novel — a sort of “Monk in the Old West” bonus, every bit as entertaining and fun as the present-day story itself.

Knowing as well that many of us crime readers enjoy a good Western novel now and again, Goldberg acknowledges this not only through the Artemis Monk adventures, but with such insider jokes as naming two minor characters in the modern story Gorman and Randisi — a friendly shout-out to two well-established and celebrated crime authors who have also make their mark in the Western genre.
 
If Goldberg keeps this up, we’ll be enjoying Monk with all his eccentricities on the printed page long after the series DVDs have collected dust on the shelf.  —Alan Cranis

Buy it at Amazon.

OTHER BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF THIS AUTHOR:
• DIAGNOSIS MURDER: THE PAST TENSE by Lee Goldberg
• MR. MONK AND THE BLUE FLU by Lee Goldberg
• MR. MONK AND THE DIRTY COP by Lee Goldberg
• MR. MONK AND THE TWO ASSISTANTS by Lee Goldberg
• MR. MONK GOES TO THE FIREHOUSE by Lee Goldberg
• MR. MONK IN OUTER SPACE by Lee Goldberg
• MR. MONK IS MISERABLE by Lee Goldberg