Mr. Monk is Miserable

Monk, the obsessive-compulsive detective created for TV, consults for the San Francisco police. Assistant Natalie is Watson to the phobic Monk's Holmes. Here she describes their latest caper in Paris, involving two murders and a group of "freegans," who live in the Catacombs on food and items scrounged from dumpsters. Laura Hicks wonderfully captures Monk's horrified reaction to this lifestyle as well as his reasoning powers, which eventually solve the crime. Natalie's near-saintly patience with him and her romantic feelings for one of the freegans also surface. It would be easy to adopt a farcical tone for this material, but Hicks doesn't; she just makes the most of the comic scenes. Add some spot-on French and French-accented English, and you have a thoroughly entertaining caper. J.B.G. (c) AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine

October 20, 2008
Goldberg's seventh novel based on the popular cable TV series fails to capture the spirit of actor Tony Shalhoub's portrayal of Adrian Monk, the brilliant obsessive-compulsive former SFPD detective traumatized by his wife's unsolved murder. To be fair, so much of the show's humor derives from visual gags that translating the character's fastidiousness and quirkiness into print would be a challenge for any writer. After a trip to Germany to track down his shrink, detailed in Mr. Monk Goes to Germany
(2008), Monk takes a detour to Paris at the instigation of his long-suffering assistant, Natalie Teeger. Like Jessica Fletcher of Murder, She Wrote
, Monk can hardly go a day without stumbling over a corpse. En route, he solves the in-flight murder of a fellow airline passenger. Once in Paris, Monk visits a sewer museum, where he notices a fresh skull amid a pile of centuries-old bones. This one's likely to divert only die-hard fans of the TV show.