Mr. Monk Goes to Hawaii Goldberg, Lee (best summer books .TXT) 📖

had a lot of odd jobs, but I’m not an ex–FBI agent or a promising criminology student or an aspiring paramedic, one of which I’d be if this were a book or a TV series instead of my life. I was bartending before I met Monk, so I suppose I could have mixed myself a nice, strong drink after work if I wanted to. But I didn’t, because I was also a widowed single mother trying to raise a twelve-year-old daughter, and it’s a good idea to do that sober.

If I’d done my research into brilliant detectives before working for Adrian Monk instead of after, I might not have taken the job.

I know what you’re thinking. Nero Wolfe and Sherlock Holmes are fictional characters, so what could I possibly learn from their assistants? The thing is, I couldn’t find any real detectives who were anything like Monk, and I was desperate for guidance. They were the only sources of information I could turn to.

Here’s what I learned from them: When it comes to assisting a great detective, you can be an ex-cop or a doctor or have other qualifications and it’s not going to make a difference. Because whatever makes your boss a genius at solving murders is going to make life impossible for everybody around him, especially you. And no matter how hard you try, that’s never going to change.

That’s especially true with Adrian Monk, who has a smorgasbord of obsessive-compulsive disorders. You can’t truly grasp the magnitude of his anxieties and phobias unless you experience them every single day like, God help me, I did.

Everything in his life has to be in order, following some arcane rules that make sense only to Monk. For instance, I’ve seen him at breakfast remove every bran flake and raisin from a bowl of Kellogg’s Raisin Bran and count them to be sure there’s a four-flake-to-one-raisin ratio in his bowl before he starts eating. How did he come up with that ratio? How did he determine that anything else “violated the natural laws of the universe?” I don’t know. I don’t want to know.

He’s also got a thing about germs, though not to the extent that he won’t go outside or interact with people, but he doesn’t make it easy.

Monk brings his own silverware and dishes to restaurants. He takes a folding lawn chair with him to the movies because he can’t bear the thought of sitting in a seat a thousand other people have sat in. When a bird crapped on my windshield, he called911. I could go on, but I think you get the picture.

Dealing with all of his quirks and acting as the middleman between him and the civilized world was very stressful stuff. It was wearing me down to the point of total exhaustion. So I turned to the books about Nero Wolfe and Sherlock Holmes hoping to glean from them some helpful advice that might make my job a little easier.

I didn’t find any.

I finally realized that my only hope was to escape, to get far away from Monk. Not forever, because as difficult as he was, I liked him, and the job was flexible enough to allow me to be there for my daughter. All I really needed were a few peaceful days off to go someplace where he couldn’t reach me and I could get some rest. The problem was, I couldn’t afford to go anywhere.

But then Lady Luck took pity on me.

I went to my mailbox one day and found a round-trip ticket to Hawaii, courtesy of my best friend, Candace. She was getting married on the island of Kauai and wanted me there as her maid of honor. She knew how strapped I was for money, so she paid for everything, booking me for seven days and six nights at the fanciest resort on the island, the Grand Kiahuna Poipu, where the wedding was going to be held.

The easy part was talking my mom into coming up from Monterey to take care of Julie for a week. The hard part was finding someone to take care of Monk.

I called a temporary staffing agency. I told them the job required basic secretarial work, some transportation, and strong “interpersonal skills.” They said they had just the right people. I was sure Monk would go through all of them before the week was over and that I would never be able to call that temp agency again. I didn’t care, because I could already feel the sand between my toes, smell the coconut lotion on my skin, and hear Don Ho singing “Tiny Bubbles” to me.

All I had to do then was break the news to Monk.

I kept putting it off until finally it was the day before I was leaving. Even then, I couldn’t seem to find the right moment. I still hadn’t found it when Monk got a call from Capt. Leland Stottlemeyer, his former partner on the SFPD, asking for his help.

That made my predicament even worse. Stottlemeyer brought Monk in to consult whenever they had a particularly tricky homicide to solve. If I left Monk in the middle of an investigation, it would make him crazy (or crazier than usual, to be precise). And Stottlemeyer wouldn’t be thrilled either, especially if it meant his case would drag on without a solution because Monk was distracted.

I cursed myself for not telling Monk before and prayed the case would turn out to be a simple one.

It wasn’t.

Somebody poisoned Dr. Lyle Douglas, the world-famous heart surgeon, while he was performing a quadruple bypass operation on Stella Picaro, his forty-four-year-old former nurse, at the hospital where she worked.

Dr. Douglas was midway through the delicate procedure, which was being observed by a dozen doctors and medical students, when he had a violent seizure and dropped dead. Another surgeon, Dr. Troy Clark, had to jump in and save the patient from dying. He succeeded.

Nobody realized Dr. Douglas had been murdered until the autopsy was completed the following day.