Hy Conrad, Mr. Monk Helps Himself

I'm happy to say that Lee Goldberg has left the Monk franchise in capable hands. Hy Conrad's Mr. Monk Helps Himself is the sixteenth in the series and the first to be written by anyone other than Goldberg. And it's good! Reading it, I was reminded of how much I would have missed Monk had the series ended rather than found a new author. In this outing, Monk and Natalie—they're now partners, as Natalie keeps insisting (a little annoyingly)—investigate the apparent suicide of a self-help guru, someone both she and Monk's beau, Poop proprietress Ellen Morse, have looked up to. There's a good mystery, though perhaps less humor and pathos than some of the other books in the series have offered.