Lee Goldberg, Mr. Monk and the Two Assistants

Mr. Monk and the Two Assistants

Lee Goldberg

NAL, July 207, $9.95, 255 pp.

ISBN: 0451220978

When Mr. Monk, a brilliant police officer lost his wife in a car bomb, he never caught the killer. He became almost catatonic, and to avoid being institutionalized, Sharona Fleming became his nurse. After a time, he came back from the dark place he retreated into and became a police consultant. Sharona helped him on his cases and with his struggle to cope with everyday life, but she left him without a word when she reconciled with her husband.

Currently single soccer mom Natalie Teeger works for him, and she copes with his obsessive compulsiveness, his need for things to be neat and his many other foibles. Now Sharona is back because her husband is in jail on a murder charge and Monk has two assistants, which make neither happy. While solving another murder almost instantaneously, Monk realizes Sharona's husband isn't the killer; someone framed him for the murder. The problem is he doesn't want to return to L.A. because there are more germs there than in San Francisco and he has to deal with a mystery writer who sees his return as a money maker,while Natalie and Sharona are angry with Monk for not helping Trevor prove his innocence.

Nobody writes stores based on television shows better than Lee Goldberg, as proven by his treatment of Mr. Monk's compulsions and people's reaction to them. Readers will thoroughly enjoy this exciting police procedural. Especially fun is Mr. Monk's struggles with the two females making his life even more miserable than usual and the expertly developed climax, in which the strange triangle face a brilliant killer matching up nicely against the eccentric hero.