"exciting police procedural"

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 help 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.

Harriet Klausner

Reviewed by Harriet Klausner
Posted July 24, 2007

Summary

Fourth in the all-new series of original mysteries starring Adrian Monk, the brilliant investigator who always knows when something's out of place.

Now that her ne'er-do-well husband has been arrested for murder, Monk's former assistant, Sharona, is ready to reclaim her place in Monk's extremely well-ordered life. But his current assistant, Natalie, is not pleased with this turn of events.

While Monk tries to maintain a delicate balance between the two women, he discovers a few snags in the case against Sharona's husband. And with other murders to investigate, Monk realizes he may be up against a killer who not only understands him, but is one step ahead.