Mr. Monk Gets Even by Lee GoldbergMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
This is a funny book. I liked the monk the TV series and book is equally good.
Monk is a obsessive compulsive detective who goes into depression when is wife is killed by a car bomb. He is thrown out of police force as he was unable to function after that. But as he is brilliant homicide detective, he is appointed consultant to SFPD.
In this book Natalie, daughter Julie is acting as Monk assistant, as a temporary measure.
l doubt a person so fat as Dale the Whale exists. If it all he exists it is very unlikely surgery can help him. He has a girl friend also who is ready to kill herself for his sake????
Monk is portrayed as Sherlock but he works backwards. He first choose the culprit and then finds clues to implicate him. SO he is no Sherlock after all.
The book is an easy read. The mystery is very ordinary both in murders and in case of Dale the Whale. However the fun is in the light tone and humorous way of treatment. Monk is very irritating and gets on nerves of everyone, me included ;).
Some Excerpts from the book.
A touch of Sherlock Holmes:
“How can you possibly expect to be an effective investigator if you don’t keep up on modern technology?”
“Murder is as old as man. Look no further than Sun Tzu. It is also disorder. All I’ve got to do is look for the things that don’t belong, are out of place, unbalanced, uneven, or missing, and if I try to restore the order, and clean up the mess, the truth will reveal itself.”
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That’s because he wasn’t the kind of detective who detected, at least not in the traditional sense of doing research, interviewing scores of people, and going through the forensics.
He was the kind who made his discoveries through the observation of people, places, and things, noticing what wasn’t quite right in what he saw, or what they said, or what they did, and putting it into order.
So he’d take whatever facts Devlin came up with and use them to interpret whatever he’d observed and, from that, make his brilliant deductions, seemingly from out of nowhere.
And it really pissed off Devlin, because she knew better than anyone that his startling “out of nowhere” deductions were often based on facts that she’d worked very hard to dig up, even if the conclusions that she’d reached from them were wrong.
But regardless, it was his deductions that got all the attention and that moved the investigations forward. Her work was usually forgotten or simply ignored. She rarely got any credit for any of the work she did that helped Monk make his stunning deductions.
I could understand her frustration and anger. But what she didn’t understand was that it wasn’t personal or intentional. Monk didn’t care about getting credit or attention. For him, it was all about restoring balance, cleaning up a mess, and making things right. It never occurred to him to thank or acknowledge anyone for their contribution to his process. The way he saw it, we were all fulfilling our obligation to maintain the natural balance of things. It would be like thanking someone for breathing.
That’s just my theory, of course.
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“That’s why you shouldn’t put anything on your skin that can’t be immediately washed off,” Monk said. “Because if you make a mistake, you have to live with it.”
“I’m not defending tattoos, but the truth is, we have to live with most of our mistakes anyway,” Ellen said. “It’s better to own them than pretend they can be undone.”
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