It has been about a month, but Barry is back today
with another all new FFB review. In addition to having a review from Barry this
week, it also means you are spared another repeat review from me. Continue with
the good news by making sure you check out the full list of reading suggestions
over at Patti’s blog.
MR. MONK IN TROUBLE
(2009) by Lee Goldberg
Reviewed by Barry
Ergang
“This is about a friend of
mine, Manny Feikema,” Captain Leland Stottlemeyer of the San Francisco Police
Department tells Adrian Monk and his assistant (and the novel’s narrator),
Natalie Teeger. “He retired about five years ago and moved to Trouble, a tiny
old mining town in the California gold country. Manny got bored after only a
couple of months, so he signed up as a security guard at the history museum
they have there…He was killed two nights ago while doing his rounds.”
Stottlemeyer wants Monk, a
former homicide cop and current departmental consultant, to go to Trouble to
track down Manny’s killer because he’s out of vacation days and can’t go
himself. The local police department is miniscule and “they don’t have the
experience or the resources to solve a murder,” Stottlemeyer explains. A fear
of tumbleweeds causes the obsessive-compulsive and germaphobic Monk to decline
the request until Natalie persuades him that she’ll protect him.
Trouble is one of many
towns that sprang up after the California gold rush of 1849, and Natalie tells
readers that “It was just as if we’d driven through a time warp and arrived in
the 1850s.” Monk, as fans of the television series and readers of earlier books
in the books based on it can imagine, is not thrilled at the prospect of
contending with a town in which, among other things, burros roam freely.
Mr. Monk in Trouble is a “twofer” of a novel, because in addition to
Adrian Monk’s sleuthing, readers are provided with sections from Abigail
Guthrie’s journal dating from 1855. She and her husband Hank left their
hardscrabble Kansas farm in 1852 after Hank learned about the gold rush. They
settled in Trouble because it was the first mining town they came to, and the
life there was at least as rigorous, if not more so, than it was in Kansas.
“…(W)e rarely panned more than six dollars a day worth of color, roughly six
pinches of gold dust, and with molasses at one dollar a bottle and flour going
for fifty cents a pound, we could barely keep ourselves fed.” The work and,
ultimately, illness took their tolls on Hank, and he died before reaching the
age of twenty-five. Abigail thus had to figure out how to survive on her own,
and wound up working for the town’s only assayer, a “peculiar and extraordinary
man who valued cleanliness and order above all else.” His name was Artemis
Monk, and in addition to assaying, he also helped the town’s sheriff with criminal
investigations.
At Trouble’s historical
museum, Adrian Monk learns of another crime: the never-solved robbery in 1962 of
over $100,000 in gold coins from the Golden Rail Express, the locomotive from
which now resides in the museum. For years, people have searched for the stolen
coins, but none have ever turned up. Although he’s there to solve Manny
Feikema’s murder, Monk becomes obsessed with the robbery and its attendant
mysteries.
As with other books in this
series, in addition to solving the primary puzzles, Adrian Monk solves a number
of incidental ones. Similarly, the reader is treated via Abigail’s journal to
multiple mysteries solved by Artemis Monk, among them the robbery of the Golden
Rail Express in 1856.
I’ve read all of the
preceding books in this series, and I have to rank Mr. Monk in Trouble as one of the best. In addition to entertaining
the reader with multiple mysteries, it’s loaded with wonderful humor, much of
it in the conversations the two Monks have with their assistants and others.
Readers familiar with contemporary crime writers will notice that author Lee
Goldberg has some fun with a few characters’ names.
Those who liked the
original TV programs should definitely enjoy this novel. Those who have never
seen the TV series but who enjoy well-paced comical detective stories should enjoy
it, too. Highly recommended.
© 2017 Barry Ergang
Some of Derringer
Award-winner Barry Ergang’s work is available at Smashwords
and Amazon.
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