Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
1 - Mr. Monk and the Gnarled Hands of Fate
2 - Mr. Monk and the Glimpse of Hell
3 - Mr. Monk and the Body
4 - Mr. Monk Goes Home
5 - Mr. Monk and the Free Day
6 - Mr. Monk and the Final Frontier
7 - Mr. Monk and the Fan
8 - Mr. Monk and the Bad Breakfast
9 - Mr. Monk and the Galactic Uprising
10 - Mr. Monk Is Thrown for a Loupe
11 - Mr. Monk Sets the World Right
12 - Mr. Monk Sorts Out the Nuts
13 - Mr. Monk and the Eye
14 - Mr. Monk and the Secret
15 - Mr. Monk and the Details
16 - Mr. Monk and the Session
17 - Mr. Monk Speaks Up
18 - Mr. Monk Connects the Dots
19 - Mr. Monk and a Thousand Suspects
20 - Mr. Monk and the Deadly Triangle
21 - Mr. Monk Goes to Burgerville
22 - Mr. Monk and the House of Horrors
23 - Mr. Monk and the X
24 - Mr. Monk Makes a Mistake
25 - Mr. Monk and the Strange Thing
26 - Mr. Monk and the Expert
27 - Mr. Monk Finds Himself
28 - Mr. Monk Spreads the Word
29 - Mr. Monk and the Revolving Door
Teaser chapter
“Can books be better than television? You bet they can— when Lee Goldberg’s writing them.” —Lee Child
Praise for the Monk Mysteries
Mr. Monk and the Two Assistants
“Mr. Monk and the Two Assistants is the best Monk novel yet.” —Ed Gorman
Mr. Monk and the Blue Flu
“A must-read if you enjoy Monk’s mysteries on the tube.”
—Bookgasm
Mr. Monk Goes to Hawaii
“An entertaining and ruefully funny diversion that stars one of television’s best-loved characters.”
—Honolulu Star-Bulletin
Mr. Monk Goes to the Firehouse
“The first in a new series is always an occasion to celebrate, but Lee Goldberg’s TV adaptations double your pleasure. . . . Mr. Monk Goes to the Firehouse brings everyone’s favorite OCD detective to print. Hooray!” —Mystery Scene
“It is laugh-out-loud funny from the get-go. For Monk fans, this is a must. Totally enjoyable. Lee Goldberg has expertly captured the nuances of what makes Monk, well, Monk.”
—Robin Burcell
“Lee has found the perfect voice for Natalie’s first-person narration—sweet, exhausted, frustrated, exasperated, and sweet again. None of these feelings has to do with the mystery. They’re all reactions to Monk’s standard behavior as he wars with all the ways nature is trying to kill him. Lee Goldberg has managed to concoct a novel that’s as good as . . . any of the Monk episodes I’ve seen on the tube.” —Ed Gorman
Copyright © 2007 Universal Studios Licensing LLLP. Monk © USA Cable
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PUBLISHER’S NOTE
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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To Valerie and Madison,
the brightest stars in the galaxy
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book was written in Los Angeles, New York, London, Hay-on-Wye, Berlin, Cologne, Munich, Lohr, and the skies in between. At times I felt like I was the one in outer space. I would like to thank my friend Andy Breckman for sharing Adrian Monk with me, and Kristen Weber, Kerry Donovan, and Gina Maccoby for their unwavering enthusiasm, understanding, and support.
I look forward to hearing from you; visit my Web site at www.leegoldberg.com.
1
Mr. Monk and the Gnarled Hands of Fate
I almost killed someone the other day. It was a guy I’d been dating casually for a few weeks. During that time, we never went further than a passionate lip-lock, thank God, and that wasn’t so great anyway. It was like sticking my tongue into a bottle of Listerine. (Note to men: Too much breath freshener is almost as bad as none at all.)
His name was Scooter, which should have been my first hint that this relationship wasn’t going to work out. I thought the nickname was cute at first, that it was a reflection of his boyish charm. I didn’t realize it was a reflection of his short attention span on matters that didn’t center on him.
But that wasn’t why I wanted to wring Scooter’s neck. It had to do with the demise of our relationship. He dumped me because, and I quote, “You’re too needy.”
Me? Needy? It was ridiculous.
I always considered myself a strong, fiercely independent woman. I spent ninety percent of my time taking care of others. By “others” I mean my daughter, Julie, and my employer, Adrian Monk, the famous detective.
Julie, like any twelve-year-old, is a real handful, but she’s nothing compared to Monk, who has such a strong obsessive-compulsive disorder that it generates a whole other universe parallel to our own.
For instance, Monk once found a cobweb in his apartment and ordered me to immediately evacuate everyone from the building and establish a quarantine until an emergency-response team from the Centers for Disease Control could arrive.
I’m not kidding. It’s a true story.
That was a typical day for me, except that there were no murders involved. I’m not talking about my own homicidal urges, but real murders. Monk is a special consultant to the San Francisco Police Department and I help him with that, too, which is definitely above and beyond typical assistant work.
So how can Scooter call me needy?
I’m not needy. I’m the one needy people rely on for their needs.
I’m the rock.
But I have to tell you, being everybody’s rock is hard work. And it’s not like I don’t have fears and unfulfilled dreams and problems of my own.
Ever since my husband, Mitch, was shot down over Kosovo, there has been no one to take care of me. I don’t have a Natalie of my own. I’m not allowed to fall apart—there’s nobody there to help me put myself back together again.
But I do stumble sometimes anyway and usually I hate myself for it.
Just a couple of days ago, in fact, I was hit out of nowhere by this awful crying jag. It happened in Monk’s apartment, right in front of him. I was reading an article in the San Francisco Chronicle about the restoration of a Craftsman-style house in Mill Valley, the kind Mitch and I had dreamt of having, and I just lost it.
God, it was embarr
assing.
Monk started spraying Lysol all around me. I wasn’t sure if he was trying to help me or protect himself from whatever I was afflicted with.
I almost told him that Lysol couldn’t shield him from what I suffered from. But I realized the truth was that Monk already knew that better than anybody. His wife, Trudy, was killed in a murder he’d been unable to solve. I think that’s why he tries so hard to impose absolute order on the world. He does it to compensate for the order he can’t impose on his own pain, loss, and longing.
Well, that’s my guess anyway.
I didn’t want Monk or my daughter to ever see me lose control of myself, to give in to my sadnesses and fears, because I had to be strong for them. I had to be their support, and if they couldn’t count on me, I was afraid of what might happen to them.
So what could I do? Where could I go?
If I couldn’t unload on somebody once in a while, especially after a glass or two of wine, then I was going to crack and—
Oh my God.
That’s when it dawned on me, right there in my car on the way to Monk’s place: All those dates with Scooter, what did I talk about?
Myself.
I talked about all of my problems, all of my needs, all of the difficulties in my life.
I unloaded.
I wasn’t fun. I wasn’t vivacious. I wasn’t sexy.
I was needy.
Fine. I was needy. Shoot me and toss my corpse into a ravine.
If Scooter had been there in the car with me that morning, I would have told him this: Sure, maybe sometimes I whined a little too much, but part of romance is finding someone who needs you as much as you need them.
I would have said that maybe if he’d shown me a little understanding and a little neediness of his own we might have discovered something truly magical and wonderful. We might have found that we needed each other. And needing someone—someone who also needs you—well, that can be pretty great.
Your loss, Scooter.
Yeah, that’s what I should have said when he told me I was too needy.
But what I actually said was nothing at all. Clever, huh? I just turned my back on him, walked into my house, and slammed the door in his face.
Why is it you always think of the perfect thing to say long after the right moment to say it has passed?
Unfortunately for me, belatedly coming up with the perfect retort to Scooter didn’t resolve the issue in my mind. I couldn’t stop thinking about my so-called neediness. I began to look at my whole life from a different perspective and I didn’t like what I saw.
The only people I met, outside of my daughter’s teachers and her friends’ parents, were cops, grieving relatives of victims, murder suspects, and killers. Not the best dating pool, which may be why I glommed on to Scooter, an insurance salesman I met at Starbucks on my way to Monk’s house one morning.
It was worse for Monk. He basically met no one. I was his social life, which, by extension, made him largely mine, whether I liked it or not.
What I needed was more friends, more things happening in my life that didn’t involve Adrian Monk or Julie.
As I parked my car outside Monk’s apartment building on Pine Street, I was determined to shake things up. I had been living in my own narrow world too long. I had to make a change.
And this was the perfect time to do it.
My daughter was away for a week on a school field trip to a camp near Sacramento, which meant I had a week to myself for the first time in years. So I planned to make the most of the free time. I figured if I was really lucky, nobody would get killed for a few days and I could even get a couple days off.
I let myself into Monk’s apartment. It was dark. All the shades were drawn and not a single light was on. I could hear whimpering.
“Mr. Monk?” I asked with trepidation.
The whimpering kicked up an octave.
I crept into the living room and found Monk sitting on the floor, resting his back against the wall and hugging his knees to his chest.
He looked devastated. I began to get scared.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Nothing,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper.
I sat down beside him on the floor. The wall was cold against my back. “Then why are you sitting in the dark whimpering?”
He shrugged. “It’s what I do when all my dreams are crushed and any hope I have for true happiness is strangled to death by the gnarled hands of fate.”
“This happens to you so often that you have a standard reaction?”
“I have a standard reaction for everything,” Monk said. “I made an indexed, color-coded list of them. Haven’t you seen it?”
“I don’t believe that particular list was part of my orientation packet.”
“I wonder what other critical lists you’ve missed,” Monk said. “I’ll have to make a list.”
“You’re going to make a list of the lists,” I said.
“See? My whole life is crumbling around me. I have nothing.”
“I’m here, Mr. Monk. You have me.” I put my hand on his knee and gave him a reassuring squeeze. “What happened?”
“It’s obvious.”
“Not to me,” I said.
“You’re joking,” he said.
“No, I’m not. I really have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Monk tipped his head towards the couch. “It’s right in front of you.”
I looked.
I saw the couch, centered in the middle of the wall.
I saw the four identically framed and sized photos of his wife, Trudy, on the wall, which I knew he carefully straightened and aligned each morning with a level and a ruler.
And I saw the coffee table, which was crooked in relation to the couch. It was the only item in the entire apartment that wasn’t perfectly centered. But that wasn’t the problem. It was intentional. Monk had explained to me that Trudy used to angle the table that way so she could put her feet up on it and he could lay his head in her lap. He left the table crooked for her. Sometimes when I came to work in the morning, I’d find a pillow where Trudy once sat, the impression of Monk’s head on it.
“I still don’t see the problem,” I said.
“Are you blind?” he said.
“It might help if I turned the lights on,” I said, beginning to get irritated. “Or better yet, you could just tell me.”
“The stain,” he said.
I stared at him. “You’re going through all this anguish over a stain?”
“It’s a coffee stain and I can’t clean it off the carpet.”
I got up and opened the shades to let in some sunlight.
He winced. “Don’t. The whole world will know my shame.”
I looked down at the carpet, expecting to see some huge mess. But the carpet was spotless.
“Where’s the stain?” I asked.
“Between the couch and the table,” he said. “You can’t miss it.”
I went to the couch, sat down on the edge, and looked at the floor.
“I still don’t see it,” I said.
“Use the magnifying glass on the table.”
“If I have to use a magnifying glass to see it, does it really matter?”
Mr. Monk in Outer Space Page 1