I loved the TV show—now long gone. It ran from 2002 through 2009. The books with orig­i­nal sto­ries by Lee Gold­berg kept on going after the Monk show ran its course. Then Lee Gold­berg stopped writ­ing them after quite a few, and Hy Con­rad took over. I may have just read the final book of the series, since Mr. Con­rad’s fourth book, Mr. Monk and The New Lieu­tenant, is his last one. He hopes some­one else will con­tin­ue, but when that one was pub­lished this year (2015) no one had yet stepped up.

So, here are my reviews of two of my favorite books—Mr. Monk is Cleaned Out by Lee Gold­berg, and Mr. Monk and The New Lieu­tenant by Hy Con­rad.

My five-star review of the first was short: “I was a big fan of the Monk TV series, and I’m a big fan of Lee Gold­berg’s Monk mys­tery series. This book is a neat com­bi­na­tion of Monk, his pho­bias, and up-to-the-minute cur­rent events! And you can just guess Monk’s thoughts about that dog with those irreg­u­lar mark­ings.”

I’ve just fin­ished read­ing the sec­ond book, and it deserves five stars as well. “Mr. Monk does not like Cap­tain Stot­tle­mey­er’s new lieu­tenant. He’s new, for one thing. (Of course, the feel­ing is mutu­al.) How­ev­er, he and Natal­ie try their best. They now have their own detec­tive agency with lit­tle busi­ness. Natal­ie takes on a divorce case (with­out Mr. Monk’s knowl­edge, and def­i­nite­ly against his approval). Then there’s the mur­der case that wasn’t—until Monk declared at a man’s funer­al that he had been mur­dered. Now they are try­ing to save the Cap­tain with the same symp­toms while track­ing down a miss­ing client. Monk con­vinces Randy Dish­er to return. With all this going on, it isn’t only Monk’s OCD that con­fus­es every­one. This time Stot­tle­mey­er’s life depends on Monk’s suc­cess.”

Both authors worked on the Monk TV show. Lee Gold­berg con­tributed to some shows and worked on dif­fer­ent series as well. Hy Con­rad was with the Monk show the whole time. Both authors give the read­er the authen­tic “Monk” voice. Gold­berg tends to give him more prob­lems with his mul­ti­ple pho­bias and per­son­al­i­ty dis­or­ders. Con­rad, writ­ing the sto­ries as Monk begins to improve (slight­ly) still shows them, but they are pos­si­bly a bit more mut­ed. (One read­er’s opin­ion here.) Both authors present a humor­ous as well as nice­ly con­vo­lut­ed sus­pense­ful sto­ry.

I do hope this isn’t the last Monk sto­ry.