A severed arm and the chance for professional redemption lead off the author’s latest novel.
There is obviously something in the water in Florida. That’s the only explanation for a state that germinated Carl Hiaasen and Dave Barry, two authors who have a bizarre way at looking at the world. Both writers, human hanging chads, are veterans of the Miami Herald.
Maybe it’s not Florida. Maybe someone should check the water cooler at the Herald.
While both authors accentuate the ridiculous (I will always cherish Barry’s description of his colonoscopy prep, with its allusion to a space shuttle launch), Hiaasen is the more acerbic. His depictions of those he obviously considers the despoilers of Florida are more biting. It has been said that the author of Tourist Season, Strip Tease, Stormy Weather, Sick Puppy, Skinny Dip and other fall-down-laughing books has infuriated just about everyone who deserves it in the Sunshine State. Bad Monkey continues the evisceration of Florida phonies, and adds a few scalps in the Bahamas to the mix.
In Bad Monkey, our hero is Andrew Yancy, a disgraced detective in the Florida Keys demoted to Restaurant Inspector, better known as the Roach Patrol. Warning: you will never eat in a restaurant again after reading this book. And there is a good chance you may never eat anywhere again.
Yancy, your basic good guy with just enough bad habits (recreational drugs, crazy women, booze, etc.) to balance his good qualities (loyalty, love of the environment, sympathy for society’s misfits, etc.), desperately wants to regain his detective’s shield. He’s a competent cop, liked even by the superiors who fired him — they salvaged his pension by getting him the Roach Patrol gig. So when he winds up with a severed arm in his freezer for safekeeping, he sees his chance for professional rehabilitation.
Boating accident? Shark attack? Yancy doesn’t think so. With the help of a gutsy — and beautiful — forensic scientist from Miami who likes sex during hurricanes, he sets out to find a murderer.
Well, that’s about 10 percent of the plot. To give away more would be a disservice to the reader, and risks brain damage to this reviewer. But a description of just a few of the characters will give an idea of what the reader is in for: there is the monkey of the title, a vicious, mangy Capuchin ape; a scabrous crone who uses voodoo and thinks the monkey is a little boy; the severed arm’s “widow,” who is anxious to prove that the rest of her husband is dead; the world’s dumbest real estate agent; and Yancy’s ex-girlfriend, on the run with her underage boyfriend (well, he was underage when he was her student; that’s why they are on the run).
Bad Monkey is one of those books that you can, but probably shouldn’t, finish at one sitting. Read a couple of chapters, then put it aside. Looking forward to what comes next is half the fun of a Hiaasen novel. Bad day at work? Kids have the upchucks? Your unemployed son with four postgraduate degrees and a Saint Bernard named Rufus says he has to move back home?
So what? Pour a glass of wine, read another two chapters and tumble off the couch laughing.
Rest assured, Hiaasen eventually pulls all the plots and characters together. Whether he knew where it was all going (a frightening thought), or whether he had to do some fast and fancy literary footwork toward the end, doesn’t matter. One reads a Hiaasen book mostly for the ride, not the destination.
Are any of his scenarios remotely plausible? Before I moved to Florida, I would have had my doubts.
Not anymore.
Lawrence De Maria was a senior editor and writer at the New York Times and Forbes. His many front-page articles led the Times’ Pulitzer Prize-nominated coverage of the 1987 stock market crash. De Maria lives in Naples, Fla., where he writes novels and short stories, is a film and book critic, and lectures on financial journalism. His first novel, Sound of Blood, and his six subsequent novels are available at amazon.com.
