Summer Reading 2024Unpublished

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5 STARS

I was pleasantly surprised to read this book. Having just returned from Paris I wanted to ease back into the New World by reading a book that still gave me a whiff of this magical city. I had never read any Monk books or seen the TV show. "Monk is Miserable" is one in a series of murder mysteries, written in the voice of his loyal assistant, Natalie Teeger. Monk is a compulsive, quirky detective, but he has unbelievable powers of observation. On their prior caper in Germany, Natalie inveigles Monk into taking a vacation in Paris with her. On their plane trip, a passenger is murdered, and Monk manages to determine the culprit before the police even get on the scene. Once they are in Paris, and visit the remarkable Paris sewer system as well as the Catacombs – a repository for the bones of millions of bodies from Paris cemeteries, Monk notices a skull which is much newer than the 200-year old skulls around it. It has dental fillings only invented in the last decade. This leads Monk and Natalie to discover a subculture of “freegans”, people who reject the wasteful contemporary lifestyle and instead dumpster dive to retrieve discarded items and wasted food in order to give them a second life. Many live in the underground tunnels of the Catacombs. Monk was miserable because one of his many anxieties was the fact of being on vacation. But solving two mysteries and riding in a “motocrotte” appease him.

-Vivian H.