Monk's life is continuing as usual until Stottlemeyer asks him to sit in on a panel at a police convention about their working relationship. The panel quickly turns into a fiasco, and one budget cut later, Monk finds himself looking for a new employer. Trying to navigate the benefits and difficulties of a position as a private eye at Intertect becomes the least of his worries when Stottlemeyer becomes suspect #1 in the murder of cop Paul Braddock.
This book includes examples of the following tropes:
- Absence of Evidence:
- The witnesses to Judge Carnegie's murder reported a number of noises, but never Carnegie's dog barking. Monk suspects (and confirms with Mrs. Carnegie) that the dog would have barked if a stranger had approached his master; therefore, the killer had to be someone the dog knew.
- One victim is Bill Peschel, a senile man who apparently walked across his lush grassy lawn in his socks, climbed onto a chair, scaled his fence and jumped into his pool and hit his head. Monk proves that he could not have done this as his socks would have had grass stains if he did, and they were bleached white. Furthermore, when Natalie stands on a lawn chair similar to one Peschel would have used, the chair sinks into the grass under her weight, yet the day before, the victim stepped on the chair and it did not sink into the wet ground.
- Blackmail: Stottlemeyer got the budget back up enough to rehire Monk by threatening to go public with the news of how he was arrested by the police department and only freed thanks to a consultant they had him lay off.
- Chekhov's Gunman: Nicholas Slade turns up shortly after Monk and Natalie get fired and offers them a much better-paying job. He turns out to be involved with the crimes they're investigating.
- Chekhov's Skill: Danielle's martial arts training comes up multiple times during the book. At the end, it allows her to go head to head (briefly) with Slade, keeping him from killing Mrs. Wurzel, Monk, and Natalie.
- Conflicting Loyalty: Poor Randy immediately has reason to regret getting to take command of an investigation when he starts uncovering evidence that Stottlemeyer might have murdered a cop he drove out of the precinct and later punched at a wake. He chooses to follow what the evidence seems to say, even though it goes against his loyalty to his mentor, but it costs him in very dramatic physical symptoms.
- Continuity Nod:
- The book acknowledges the death of Dr. Kroger (and Stanley Kamel in turn) and is the first novel with Dr. Bell.
- Salvatore Lucarelli, the crime boss from "Mr. Monk Meets the Godfather", hires Monk to prove his innocence when two judges scheduled to hear a case against him are killed in apparent gangland style.
- When Monk compares riding in an elevator to being buried alive, Natalie thinks he's overreacting, and he archly reminds her that he actually has been buried alive twice before (in "Mr. Monk Vs. the Cobra" and "Mr. Monk and the Buried Treasure") and knows more about it than she does. Natalie concedes the point.
- Natalie recalls Disher demonstrating a Bodily Fluid Blacklight Reveal to her, similar to the one Monk was treated to in "Mr. Monk Takes A Vacation", and reflects that, since then, she has shared her boss's Properly Paranoid reaction to apparently spotless hotel rooms.
- Detective Mole: Nick Slade, the killer, is a private investigation agency CEO who hires Monk and Natalie after Monk loses his consulting job.
- Disproportionate Retribution: Monk and Natalie stop by a Chinatown salon where they use bird excrement to give geisha facials to interview a person of interest in a double homicide. Monk is so disgusted that he calls in a Hazmat team and a SWAT team!
- Embarrassing Cover-Up: When Natalie needs to talk to Danielle about something in private, she tells Monk she's run out of tampons. As she expected, Monk freaks out and insists they leave the room.
- Exact Words: When Natalie thinks that Danielle is driving Monk to the point of exhaustion by giving him dozens of case files to work on without a break (actually, their boss is responsible), she tells Monk that she's going to go "give Danielle a hand." What she really means is that she's thinking about punching Danielle.
- Heroic Dog: Subverted. When they're looking at the Carnegie murder, Natalie notices signs that the dog had dragged the body and sadly concludes that the poor thing was trying to get help for its master. Actually, it turns out that Mrs. Carnegie was the killer; the dog was just trying to follow someone it knew.
- Hypocrite: The Starter Villain of the book is an academic who plagiarized some obscure legal texts and also wrote a paper viciously condemning plagiarists in all sectors of life. When one of his students innocently comments on the similarities between the old texts and his book, the professor kills him to keep his hypocrisy secret.
- No Honor Among Thieves: Slade tries to shoot Mrs. Wurzel to make sure she can't give him away, and after they're arrested, both waste no time trying to turn state's evidence on each other in exchange for a lighter sentence.
- Reassigned to Antarctica: Stottlemeyer mentions that he drove out Paul Braddock, a Dirty Cop who violated peoples' rights and beat them up by giving him a choice: either risk Internal Affairs ripping him apart, or take a job in the small Mojave Desert town of Banning, California.
- Shout-Out: There is a portion of the story where Monk and Natalie are hired by a private investigations agency called Intertect. Said agency was taken from the old 1960s private eye show Mannix. Additionally, there is a person mentioned in passing named Lew Wickersham, a reference to that show.
- Stepping Out for a Quick Cup of Coffee: Monk and Natalie visit the police station to confront Randy, now an acting captain instead of a lieutenant, for arresting Stottlemeyer (who had been framed). Randy even does that "get a cup of coffee line" and leaves the case file out on the desk for them. Natalie catches on immediately; Monk needs to have the whole thing spelled out for him before he understands that Randy meant the opposite of what he said.
- Stress Vomit: Randy loses his breakfast when he has to arrest Stottlemeyer for murder.
- Suspiciously Specific Denial: A recently laid-off Monk calls in anonymous tips to the tip line in one scene claiming he is Anonymous and definitely is not associated with Adrian Monk.
- Wanting Is Better Than Having: Randy gets to be the Acting Captain of the department, but it comes at the cost of having to arrest his mentor for murder.
- Working the Same Case: The murders of two men, Paul Braddock and Bill Peschel are being investigated by different parties simultaneously: Lt. Disher to Braddock's death, and Monk and Natalie to Peschel's death. Monk eventually finds evidence that both were killed by Nick Slade.
- Your Approval Fills Me with Shame: Randy hopes that the deputy chief will think he's jumping the gun in ordering a search in Stottlemeyer's apartment, but instead he commends him for not letting his loyalty to his commanding officer get in the way. Randy still feels horrible about it.
