Mr. Monk Goes to the Firehouse by Lee Goldberg

"Monk" is my favorite TV show. I watch it regularly, and have all the past seasons on DVD in case I get the urge and need a quick fix. So when I discovered that someone had begun to write a series of novels based on the character, I eagerly jumped in with gusto.

Being a connoisseur of the TV show makes me that much more judgemental on anything that follows. For instance, I don't know as of this writing how the TV writers will address the issue of the actor who portrayed Monk's psychiatrist having passed away earlier this month, but it's a situation that deserves a lot of attention, and just hiring another actor to play the same character will not be an acceptable solution, in my opinion. But I am here to discuss a book, not the show.

First book in the series, "Mr. Monk Goes to the Firehouse" was an interesting story, but disturbed me because it was basically a rewriting of an episode in the TV series, "Mr. Monk Can't See A Thing" and although it has everyone doing different things, the similarity took away from some of the enjoyment I could have otherwise derived from the book. I later found out that the book came first and the episode was a reworking of the novel, but this still did not change my first opinion. Probably because I rate the TV show on a higher scale.

I have to say, also, that I'm not entirely comfortable with the author's decision to tell the stories in this series from a first person point of view of the character of Natalie Teeger. For one thing, Natalie, on the TV show, always calls Monk "Mr. Monk", even when she is talking about him to another person. But the author chooses at various points in the book to have her refer to him as just "Monk" when describing the story. This is an author's privelege of course. There aren't many books out there, none that I've read anyway, that don't shorten a person's name for the sake of brevity, but in this case it was distracting.

All-in-all, though, it was a great alternative to a TV show, although not one I'd be interested in seeing turned into an episode. (More on that in a later book review, by the way.)

I give this one 6½ stars.