A severed arm ends up on the hook of a Key West tourist, and subsequently in the freezer of Andrew Yancey, former Miami and Key West police officer, current “Roach Patrol” tourist seafood-trap restaurant inspector. Yancey takes it upon himself to use the case to reclaim the most recent job he lost after publicly sodomizing his lover’s husband with a vacuum cleaner in a fit of passionate rage. To do so, he must wade through a typical Hiaasen cast: a curiously grieving widow and her equally ditzy stepdaughter; an unattractive yet perilously seductive voodoo witch with a long line of deceased past lovers; an almost unidentifiable primate in diapers who supposedly played alongside Johnny Depp in the Pirate of the Caribbean movies and comes from a long line of celebrity capuchins; and an equal parts sexy and assistive Dade County coroner who finds other uses for her examining table.
Bad Monkey by lifelong Floridian Carl Hiaasen is more comedy/mystery than vice-versa. Though a murder takes Andrew Yancey from Miami to Key West to the outer islands of the Bahamas, it is done on his own dime, with basically no interest or reason to solve the case for anybody but himself. While a couple shady real-estate moguls and some Medicare fraudsters get their comeuppance and despite a suspenseful, almost written-for-script, moment involving a showdown in the rain, readers looking for a thriller mystery will find this book more Charlie Brown than Encyclopedia Brown.
As should be known, however, comedy is certainly Hiaasen’s strong suit. With non-stop, tongue-in-cheek jabs, Hiaasen, continuously entertains with sardonic descriptions of everything from the sites seen that keep Yancey from being able to finish a meal at a public place — “Yancey saw one of the cooks sneeze into a Whopper but the manager made him throw it away, so Yancey didn’t write him up.”– to the lurid Miami crime scene – “Last week I did a post [mortem] on a man who had a clarinet up his colon. That’s not what killed him, by the way. It was a single gunshot to the head from a jealous lover. She played the oboe.”
As a long-time columnist for the Miami Herald, Hiaasen has a view of South Florida not obscured by beautiful women and yearlong summers. Yet while his wit fits neatly in the confines of the newspaper page, in a novel, his comedic style feels increasingly stale, especially after a couple hundred pages. Familiar readers will be no-doubt thrilled with another summertime comedy perfect for plane rides to or (preferably) from their Bad Monkey-esque beachside destinations or the long fishing trips where they might be glad to have caught nothing rather than a severed arm. Many new readers will likely settle into the repetitively sarcastic, yet undeniably amusing style, and will no doubt find a new favorite author of unpretentious, though uninspiring, quick-read fiction.
