“Mr. Monk and the Blue Flu” by Lee Goldberg

If you think the plethora of phobias plaguing detective Adrian Monk is insufferable, wait until he is reinstated to the San Francisco Police Department as acting captain of homicide. When the Blue Flu strikes the SFPD, including Captain Leland Stottlemeyer and Lt. Randy Disher, the mayor reinstates Monk along with three other former detectives, each with their own mental issues….and assistants. Much to the chagrin of Stottlemeyer, Monk happily accepts the job of commanding the “scabs”, and delves into a series of murders that include astrologers, a cop-killer, and a predator with a female foot fetish known as the Golden Gate Strangler.

Monk’s team includes a retiree with bouts of senility aided by his bored, apathetic granddaughter, a gunslinger with anger issues who bullies his counselor, and a paranoiac with a tinfoil covered head full of alien abduction conspiracies shadowed by her shrink.

They make Natalie grateful, believe me.

As usual with his Monk novels, Lee Goldberg adroitly captures the characters and creates plausible mysteries-within-mysteries as on the television series. Each of Goldberg’s stories is told completely from the POV of Natalie Teeger, a young widow and single mom who is also Adrian Monk’s full time assistant/caretaker. As a long time fan of the TV series, I can easily hear the voices of Tony Shalhoub, Ted Levine, Jason Gray-Stanford, and Traylor Howard when reading the dialogue. There is little to no fluff in the Monk novels which I also admire. Each scene and chapter moves the story along while also taking the time for character development.