Season synopsis
Contains spoilers for this season and earlier seasons.
After Dr. Kroger dies, Monk buys a house to escape a neighbor’s piano playing and discovers that the previous owner’s apparent fall was murder. He starts working with Dr. Neven Bell, whose calmer approach gives Monk a new place to bring his anxieties. Cases stretch him in different directions: he investigates a murder aboard a submarine with Natalie, pursues a suspect even after she confesses, and handles his hundredth case while a television crew revisits people he has caught. During that serial-killer investigation, Monk notices one killing that does not fit the pattern and finds a second murderer has copied the evidence.
Natalie takes a lottery job, while Monk’s own independence remains a recurring problem; he is shot while helping her recover a stolen bicycle and has to work from a wheelchair. His friendship with Marge Johnson also unsettles him because he cannot believe a neighbor would simply want his company. The season’s sharpest personal loss comes when Kevin Dorfman, Monk’s talkative upstairs neighbor, is strangled backstage after discovering an irregularity in magician Karl Torini’s accounts. Monk follows a detail others miss: Torini’s equipment returned from overseas heavier than when it left. He links the added weight to heroin smuggling, works through Torini’s alibi, and helps Stottlemeyer and Disher arrest the magician and his assistant. In the finale, Monk tries to stop the parking garage where Trudy was killed from being demolished, but the disappearance of a councilwoman and a pair of murders complicate his effort to preserve the site.