Mr. Monk in Trouble is the 9th book in the Mr. Monk book series. It was released on December 01, 2009 by NAL.
Synopsis[]
Ever since a 1962 unsolved train robbery made it famous, people have flocked to the town of Trouble in California's gold country, searching for the booty that train robbers supposedly dumped off the Golden Rail Express in a botched heist. When the town's museum's watchman is murdered, Adrian Monk and his assistant, Natalie, are sent to investigate. But if Monk isn't careful, he'll learn that the town of Trouble can live up to its name.[1]
Plot[]
Main story[]
On Halloween, Adrian Monk hates trick-or-treaters, and considers it a form of extortion. A grown man named Clarence Lenihan trick-or-treats at his door. Monk exposes him as a killer on the blood spatter patterns on his clothes. Captain Stottlemeyer arrives and arrests Lenihan.
Two days later, Monk and Natalie Teeger are called to the police station, where Stottlemeyer asks them to investigate the murder of a friend of his, a SFPD beat cop named Manny Feikema, who retired a few years ago and moved to the old mining town of Trouble, in central California. He took the job of security guard at their history museum after he got bored. It wouldn't be any of the SFPD's business, but the Trouble police chief has contacted Stottlemeyer to see if someone Manny put away has been released recently. Stottlemeyer can't investigate himself because he is out of vacation days.
Monk and Natalie make their way east to Trouble, driving through a swarm of migrating butterflies that leave the windshield filthy. Harley Kelton, the police chief and a former Boston cop, takes them to the Gold Rush Museum, housed inside Trouble's old train station. Manny Feikema walked the perimeter every hour and logged in at sensors to confirm that he was patrolling. The killer struck Manny from behind with a pick from a diorama and used his key card to leave at 2:32 AM. Monk questions why the killer used the pick instead of bringing his own weapon and why nothing appears to have been taken. The steam locomotive on display in the museum is from the famous Golden Rail Express train.
According to the museum director, Ed Randisi, the Golden Rail Express was a private railroad built in the 19th century to run the wealthy barons from San Francisco up to their mining operations in Central California. It was eventually made a public operation, and shortened to start in Sacramento. A high stakes poker game contrived by a developer proposing a housing tract outside Trouble would mark the final run in 1962. During the game, the train was held up by three masked men, who robbed the gambling car of all of the loot. A security guard was shot and the conductor, Ralph DeRosso, fell off the train and died of his injuries. Two of the robbers, George Gilman and Jake Slocum, were immediately caught with the distinctive gold coins in their pockets, but what happened to the gold is a mystery. Several theories have come up as to what happened, one of which is that the bags were thrown off the train, which seems unlikely since the bags would have broken open, and the only things found trackside were the guns and masks used by the robbers.
Monk becomes obsessed with solving the train robbery, and visits the office of Doris Thurlo, Trouble's historian. She faints when Monk, evidently still in the Halloween mood, says "In the flesh. And I've come here for you." When she awakes she calls Natalie "Abby". It emerges that Thurlo mistook Adrian for Artemis Monk, an assayer in Trouble during the Gold Rush period who is Adrian's exact look-alike. Thurlo's office is Artemis's old cabin, called the Box House because of its perfectly square shape. Artemis Monk was a very important figure in Trouble, responsible for sampling and testing rock samples brought in by miners and then telling them how good their claim was. He also helped the sheriff solve cases that came up year after year.
Monk and Natalie learn from Doris that Gilman was the one who shot the guard. Gilman and Slocum claimed to have been hired by DeRosso to pull off the robbery. Gilman died in prison, but Slocum made parole in the early 1990s. The train was kept running for twenty years after the heist due to the resulting fame. Though the engineer, Leonard McElroy, died of lung cancer six months before the train was terminated, the boilerman, Clifford Adams, worked until the very last day and now lives in a shack near an old mine outside of Trouble. The locomotive is the only part of the train to have survived the scrapping of the train's cars, which were torn apart and searched for hidden compartments. Natalie starts reading The Amazing Mr. Monk, a diary written by Artemis's widowed assistant Abigail Guthrie.
The next day, Monk and Natalie visit Dorothy's Chuckwagon, the local diner, and talk to Crystal DeRosso, Ralph DeRosso's daughter, about the robbery. She denies that her father was involved in the robbery, citing as proof that McElroy and Adams both gave portions of their paychecks to the DeRosso family for 20 years. While they are eating, they encounter Bob Gorman, an auto mechanic and now the museum's volunteering security guard, who tells them that a few days before the murder, a man driving a 1964 Thunderbird stopped by his garage and asked him for directions to Manny's place.
With some consulting from Kelton, Monk and Natalie locate Clifford Adams at his old shack. He says that the train never stopped during the robbery because the robbers threatened to kill anyone who tried to stop the train before they reached Trouble.
Thanks to a call to Stottlemeyer, they track down Jake Slocum to a retirement home in Angels Camp. Slocum tells them he and Gilman supported themselves by committing muggings and burglaries. While contemplating their next move at a bar in Placerville, they saw Ralph DeRosso, who recruited them to carry out the train robbery. Slocum and Gilman were to meet on the platform outside the gambling car, put on masks, overpower the guard, and load the money into burlap sacks brought in by a robber entering from the front end of the train. This third man would take the bags with him. Slocum and Gilman would then toss their stuff off the train, and then rejoin the party in the dining car, without ever being missed. Once the heat died down, DeRosso would meet up with them to give them their share of the loot. Gilman shot the guard instead of overpowering him, and DeRosso fell off the train. But the deviation from the plan which resulted in their capture was their taking some of the gold coins with them, against DeRosso's warning.
Kelton matches Gorman's information to an enforcer Manny put away named Gator Dunsen, who lives in Jackson. As they follow Kelton to Gator's house, Natalie tries running some other theories about the robbery, but Monk shoots them all down, since her theories involve the third man jumping off the train and somehow surviving. When they reach Gator's house, a shootout ensues and Kelton kills Gator. Monk and Natalie are ejected from the scene by Detective Lydia Wilder of the local police, who also berates Kelton for pursuing Gator without contacting them. The evidence hinting that Gator is the killer is overwhelming - Gorman's statement from the restaurant, and photos of the museum's diorama that suggest Gator was casing the place.
However, Monk disbelieves Gator's guilt: his car was clean, when going into or out of Trouble involves passing through the swarm of migrating butterflies, and the pick used as the murder weapon is not present in the diorama photos, meaning they were taken after the murder. Monk believes someone planted those photos to frame Gator. When they reach Trouble, they notice Adams leaving the museum in his pickup truck. Gorman sees Monk and Natalie and waves hi.
The next morning, she gets a call that seems to be coming from Adams, who offers to identify Manny's killer. Monk and Natalie race out to Adams's compound, but find him dead. Monk falls into an old mine shaft. Natalie dislocates her shoulder and rips some of her fingernails out pulling him up. Monk drives the car back to the main road where they are able to get a signal to call for help. Natalie is taken to the hospital, and her arm is put into a sling after Kelton pops her shoulder back into place.
Natalie spends much of the day in a stupor, finally coming around in the evening. Monk has gone out, but he has apparently been making calls to Stottlemeyer, Lieutenant Disher, Doris Thurlo, and the voicemail for the museum. Desperate, she tracks down Kelton, and tries to see if he knows where Monk is.
Natalie suspects Gorman of killing Manny Feikema and then leading them astray, meaning he could be involved with Gator Dunsen's death. She also wonders if Gorman killed Adams, but then realizes that the distance from town to Adams' compound is great enough that Gorman would have had to miss one of his rounds in the time it would take to drive out to Adams' place, kill Adams, then drive back. When Natalie and Kelton enter the museum, they find Gorman looking inside the locomotive's furnace. Kelton draws a gun on him, and Monk comes out of the diorama, revealing that he has solved the robbery of the Golden Rail Express.
Here's What Happened[]
Ralph DeRosso was the robber who entered the gambling car from in front. Slocum and Gilman did not know that McElroy and Adams were also in on the job. After they loaded the money into burlap sacks, DeRosso delivered them to Adams and McElroy up in the locomotive, then fell off the train. Adams and McElroy tossed the bags into the furnace. Burlap sacks were used because they would burn more easily. They melted the gold and used it to line the furnace. The plan was to recover the furnace after the locomotive was scrapped, but the resulting fame of the train caused the service to continue for 20 more years. When the train was taken out of service in 1982, the locomotive was snatched up by the museum and they could not recover the furnace.
A few weeks before Manny was killed, Kelton read Abigail Guthrie's diary. He figured out what happened, and wanted to steal the gold, but knew Manny would not help him. Kelton instead partnered with Gorman, who killed Manny for the job of night watchman and has been spending his nights digging the gold out of the furnace, which left his hands covered in soot. Kelton is actually holding his gun on Natalie, not on Gorman.
Gator was their scapegoat. Before Monk, Natalie, and Kelton arrived, Gorman forced Gator at gunpoint to drink himself into a stupor, then tied him up and gagged him with duct tape, and planted the photos of the diorama. When Monk, Natalie and Kelton arrived, Gorman pretended to be Gator, and shot up the front door, though he wasn't trying to kill any of them. Once Kelton entered the house, all of the shots that they heard were for show, except the one that killed Gator. Kelton spent the extra time staging the scene, and then covered Gorman's escape out the back door. Removing the duct-tape left Gator's lips chapped and bleeding.
Kelton saw Adams leaving the museum and feared he had found them out, so he killed Adams and faked his voice to lure Monk and Natalie to the concealed mine shafts. When they were meeting the paramedics at the turnoff for the road leading to Adams' place, Monk found a pebble in a pothole. It became lodged in Kelton's tires when he parked in Gator's driveway, and got knocked loose when he passed over the pothole on his way out to the compound.
Stottlemeyer, Disher and several police officers burst out of hiding and arrest Gorman and Kelton for their crimes.
Natalie is unhappy that Monk used her to trap Kelton. While at the Chuckwagon, Stottlemeyer admits to her that Monk cared more about catching Kelton than about her feelings.
On their last day, they return Abby Guthrie's journal back to Thurlo and ask what happened to her and Artemis Monk. Thurlo believes that Artemis married Abby and they moved to San Francisco.
Short stories[]
Mr. Monk in Trouble incorporates four Gold Rush-era short mysteries, framed as excerpts from The Amazing Mr. Monk.
- "The Case of Piss-Poor Gold" - Artemis proves a cowhand named Bud Lolly guilty of smashing in a miner's skull and stealing his gold simply by the splinters and tar on his clothing before even seeing the body.
- "The Case of the Snake in the Grass" - Artemis proves that a placer miner is trying to salt his mine to cheat the buyer he is planning to sell to.
- "The Case of the Cutthroat Trail" - Artemis solves a miner's murder just based on how the killer slit the victim's throat.
- "The Case of the Golden Rail Express" - Two men from Trouble hold up the Golden Rail Express, kill three people and shoot two others, and then make off with their money, which they use to salt their mine so they could con the businessman they were selling out to.
Characters[]
- Clarence Lenihan
- Manny Feikema
- Bob Gorman
- Doris Thurlo
- Crystal DeRosso
- Jake Slocum
- Gator Dunsen
- Detective Lydia Wilder
- Clifford Adams
- Ed Randisi
- Leonard McElroy
- George Gilman
- Ralph DeRosso
Trivia[]
- In the foreword, Lee Goldberg places the events of the novel between its predecessor Mr. Monk and the Dirty Cop and the season 8 premiere "Mr. Monk's Favorite Show".
- In 19th century Trouble, the town's doctor was named Dr. Sloan. This is likely a reference to Dr. Mark Sloan, the protagonist of Diagnosis, Murder. Goldberg has written several Diagnosis Murder novels.
Gallery[]
