Mr. Monk on the Road

Table of Contents

 

Mr. Monk on the Road

 

Mr. Monk Is Cleaned Out

 

Mr. Monk in Trouble

 

Mr. Monk and the Dirty Cop

 

Mr. Monk Is Miserable

 

Mr. Monk Goes to Germany

 

Mr. Monk in Outer Space

 

Mr. Monk and the Two Assistants

 

Mr. Monk and the Blue Flu

 

Mr. Monk Goes to Hawaii

 

Mr. Monk Goes to the Firehouse

OBSIDIAN
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First published by Obsidian, an imprint of New American Library,
a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

First Printing, January 2011

Copyright © 2011
Monk
© USA Cable Entertainment LLC. All Rights Reserved.

OBSIDIAN and logo are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA:

Goldberg, Lee, 1962-
Mr. Monk on the road: a novel/by Lee Goldberg.
p. cm.
“An Obsidian mystery.”
“Based on the USA network television series created by Andy Breckman.”

eISBN : 978-1-101-49546-9

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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.

The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

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AUTHOR’S NOTE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

If you haven’t watched the final episode of the TV series
Monk
, and you don’t want the solution to the murder of Adrian’s wife, Trudy, ruined for you, don’t read this book yet, because I am going to give it all away in the first few pages.

This story picks up a few months after the events in my book
Mr. Monk Is Cleaned Out
and the final episodes of
Monk
. But don’t worry, you won’t be lost if you haven’t read the previous Monk books or missed the TV show.

I have invented all of the campgrounds described in this book and took several geographic liberties to serve my creative needs, so any attempt to replicate Monk’s road trip, or to see what Ambrose saw out of the window of their motor home, will be frustrating.

I want to thank Martin Onken at Expedition Motor Homes in Calabasas, California, and Jim Royal at Niel’s Motor Homes in North Hills, California, for their help.

I also found several books extremely useful, including
The Complete Idiot’s Guide to RVing
by Brent Peterson,
RVing Basics
by Bill and Jan Moeller,
RV Vacations for Dummies
by Shirley Slater and Harry Basch,
Road Trip USA: Pacific Coast Highway
by Jamie Jensen,
Frommer’s Exploring America by RV
, and
Frommer’s Best RV & Tent Campgrounds in the U.S.A
. But I am especially indebted to the late William C. Anderson for a key clue, which was inspired by a memorable anecdote he related in his very funny and entertaining book
Please ... Don’t Tailgate the Real Estate
.

And I owe Sean Vitousek a nod for the mathematical equation regarding the stresses on the Bixby Creek Bridge.

As usual, I have to thank my good friend and cardiologist Dr. D. P. Lyle for his advice on all things medical, which I have undoubtedly screwed up, much to his shame and disappointment. And, finally, this book would not have been possible without the continued support of Andy Breckman, Gina Maccoby, Kim Niemi, and Kerry Donovan.

But most of all I thank you for continuing to read these books and letting me know what you think of them. You have truly been my inspiration. I look forward to hearing from you at
www.leegoldberg.com
.

CHAPTER ONE

A
drian Monk thinks change is fine as long as everything stays the same. That may sound like a contradiction to you, but it’s not one in the parallel universe that Monk lives in.

He wants everything in his life to be orderly, consistent, symmetrical, and even numbered. But now he’s closer than he’s ever been to achieving that balance and he owes it all to change.

It’s an irony he’ll never appreciate.

That’s because irony is a humorous contradiction and Monk doesn’t have a sense of humor and can’t accept incongruity. I think it has something to do with his obsessive-compulsive disorder, which got so bad after the murder of his wife a decade ago that he was thrown off the San Francisco police force as psychologically unfit. But it’s his OCD and his almost supernatural ability to see details the rest of us take for granted that make him such a brilliant detective, so the police ended up hiring him as a homicide consultant.

That’s another irony that’s lost on him.

Irony seems to go hand in hand with the changes in Monk’s life and he had a lot of them happen all at once.

California had been hit hard by the bad economy, and as a result his consultancy job—and with it my employment as his long-suffering assistant—was constantly at risk because of budget cutbacks. Twice he’d been fired because the city couldn’t afford, financially or politically, to keep him on the payroll at the same time they were making draconian cuts in jobs and services. It made us both very nervous. Luckily, I was able to use Monk’s ability to solve a particularly puzzling, high-profile homicide as leverage to get him a three-year, pay-or-play contract, giving us both some job stability.

Uncertainty is a kind of imbalance, so giving Monk that job security was an important change, even if all I did was keep everything the same for three more years. Sameness was a change he could embrace.

But as much as he wanted everything to remain the same, there was one ever-present thing in his life he was yearning to change.

And it finally happened.

For more than a decade, he’d been haunted by his inability to solve the murder of his wife, Trudy, a reporter killed by a car bomb a few days before Christmas. The solution to her murder eluded him even though he solved every other homicide case that came his way, no matter how puzzling or complex.

He was painfully aware of the cruel contradiction. It was a constant, nagging imbalance at the center of his being that didn’t change no matter how even, symmetrical, and orderly he managed to make everything else in his life.

But the cruelest twist was still to come. It turned out that the solution to Trudy’s murder had been right in front of him all along.

On the day of her death, Trudy videotaped a message for him, put the tape in a box, and wrapped it as a Christmas gift, which, after her murder, he couldn’t bring himself to open.

It wasn’t until he’d been poisoned by an assassin and his own death seemed certain (a false alarm, fortunately) that he finally opened the gift and watched her final message.

In the tape, Trudy revealed that she’d had an affair with a married law professor a few years before she’d met Monk. She’d gotten pregnant, and the baby died in childbirth in the midwife’s arms. Now the professor was being appointed as a judge and insisted on meeting Trudy, who agreed to see him even though she felt very uneasy about it. She recorded the video so Monk would know the truth if something terrible happened to her.

Armed with this knowledge, Monk was able to find the evidence that proved that the judge killed both Trudy and the midwife who helped deliver the baby, to keep his adultery and the pregnancy from ever becoming a public scandal. The judge ultimately took his own life rather than face prosecution.

Solving the mystery of Trudy’s murder gave Monk the peace and internal sense of balance that he’d lost. It didn’t cure his OCD, but it lessened the sadness that he’d carried with him every day since her murder.

Trudy was still gone, but he no longer felt as if he’d failed her, too.

A few days later, he learned that Trudy’s baby didn’t actually die as she’d been told but had been secretly given up for adoption by the midwife.

Captain Leland Stottlemeyer, Monk’s oldest friend and his boss on the SFPD, found the now-adult child. Her name was Molly Evans and she worked as a movie critic for the
San Francisco Chronicle
.