Mr. Monk and the Dirty Cop - Lee Goldberg

MR. MONK AND THE DIRTY COP, the latest novel in the tie-in series by Lee Goldberg, will be released next week, and you should do yourself a favor and pick up a copy. I’ve mentioned here before how much I enjoy these books, and this one is no exception.

MR. MONK AND THE DIRTY COP finds Adrian Monk being forced out of his comfort zone again (as if Monk actually has a comfort zone). Budget cuts cause his old friend Captain Stottlemeyer to fire him from his job as a consultant for the San Francisco Police Department, so Monk winds up going to work for a snazzy, high-tech private detective and security outfit called Intertect (a deliberate nod on Goldberg’s part to the old MANNIX TV series – and not the only such nod in this book, either). Naturally, there are several cases going on, and also naturally, some of them wind up being linked in ways that aren’t readily apparent at first. Monk, with the able assistance of narrator Natalie Teeger, sorts through them in his own distinctive way. The stakes are raised higher than usual, though, when someone he’s close to winds up in jail, charged with murder.

As always, Lee Goldberg has the voices of the characters down perfectly and spins his yarn in smooth, often funny, and occasionally poignant prose. The plot has just the right level of complexity. There are a lot of excellent tie-in novels out there (the level of writing in the genre has never been higher than it is right now), but the Monk books are some of the very best. Don’t miss MR. MONK AND THE DIRTY COP.