Goldberg, Lee: Mr. Monk Goes to Hawaii

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Mr. Monk Goes to Hawaii is the second in a series of mysteries by Lee Goldberg based on the television series Monk, which stars Tony Shaloub as the obsessive compulsive Detective Adrian Monk. (See my review of Mr. Monk Goes to the Firehouse.) Monk can't deal with the dirty minutiae of everyday life, but he has a compensatory gift for noticing the telling details that others miss, which makes him both unspeakably annoying to those around him and a brilliant detective. The stories in the Monk books are narrated in the first person by Natalie Teeger, Monk's personal assistant, who provides her boss with a steady stream of Wet Naps and caters, more or less patiently, to his eccentricities.

In this outing, after the solution of an intriguing medical mystery in the book's first chapter, Natalie flies off to Hawaii to attend a friend's wedding, eager for a blissfully Monk-free week on Kauai, but feeling somewhat guilty for having left Monk bereft of her support. Happily, he crashes the party by booking a seat on the same flight. The chore of packing and traveling on a germ-infested airplane would normally be nearly impossible for Monk, but a dose of prescription dioxynl leaves him temporarily compulsion-free, enough to not only enjoy the flight but to use a public restroom and eat off someone else's plate. Once landed in Hawaii, and returned to his usual self, Monk intrudes on the case loads of the local constabulary, who are more than happy for his take on the murder-by-coconut of an elderly woman at Monk's hotel.

There were precisely three spots in Mr. Monk Goes to Hawaii when I thought its author was being slightly sloppy--once, for example, when Natalie mentions that she and Monk have to be somewhere in three hours when they can't possibly have that much time to wait (see pages 116, 133, and 138). That is to say, there were three very minor tics in Goldberg's writing that brought me for a moment out of my reading trance. For the rest, it's all good. This second book in the series is a charming read, with funny dialogue that is true to the television series. The experience is really very much the same as as sitting down to watch the show--except that one's enjoyment of the story lasts longer than an hour. Pure escapist fun.