Mr. Monk on the Couch by Lee Goldberg

I think opening sentences are can be so important in getting the attention of the readers and setting the tone for the book. Here are the openers for Mr. Monk on the Couch!

Title: Mr. Monk on the Couch

Author: Lee Goldberg
Hardcover: 288 pages; New American Library

Publication date: June 7, 2011
Genre: mystery

Opening sentences: "There is never a day off from death. I was sitting at my kitchen table in my bathrobe and slippers, eating a cream cheese-slathered bagel for breakfast and reading the massive Sunday editions of the San Francisco Chronicle and the New York Times, when I got a phone call from Captain Leland Stottlemeyer of the San Francisco Police Department, notifying me of a homicide.I'm not a cop, but I'm on call 24/7 to the police department anyway."

Book description: Monk is back in the twelfth book based on the USA Network television series. Three strangers, each a murder victim: a security guard, a struggling student, and a beautiful woman. They have something more in common than death and Monk can't believe what it is-a couch. Before you find out why, you'd better sit down.

I've enjoyed the TV series and my husband is a big fan.

Book Review: My Korean Deli by Ben Ryder Howe

From the new memoir, My Korean Deli: Risking It All for a Convenience Store by Ben Ryder Howe, a New York writer:

"Last summer my wife's family and I decided to buy a deli. By fall, with loans from three different relatives, two new credit cards, and a sad kiss good-bye to thirty thousand dollars my wife and I had saved while living in my mother-in-law's Staten Island basement, we had rounded up the money. Now it is November, and we are searching New York City for a place to buy." (ch. 1)

Publisher's description: "It starts with a gift, when Ben Ryder Howe's wife, the daughter of Korean immigrants, decides to repay her parents' self-sacrifice by buying them a store. Howe, an editor at the rarefied Paris Review, agrees to go along. Things soon become a lot more complicated. My Korean Deli follows the store's tumultuous life span, and along the way paints the portrait of an extremely unlikely partnership between characters with shoots across society, from the Brooklyn streets to Seoul to Puritan New England. Owning the deli becomes a transformative experience for everyone involved as they struggle to salvage the original gift—and the family—while sorting out issues of values, work, and identity."

Comments: A cute, amusing memoir about family, culture, and a financial attempt in the diverse city of New York.

About the author: Ben Ryder Howe is a former senior editor of The Paris Review and has written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, and Outside. His work has been selected for Best American Travel Writing.  He and his family live on Staten Island.