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Summary
Summary
Andrew Yancy--late of the Miami Police and soon-to-be-late of the Monroe County sheriff's office--has a human arm in his freezer. There's a logical (Hiaasenian) explanation for that, but not for how and why it parted from its shadowy owner. Yancy thinks the boating-accident/shark-luncheon explanation is full of holes, and if he can prove murder, the sheriff might rescue him from his grisly Health Inspector gig (it's not called the roach patrol for nothing). But first--this being Hiaasen country--Yancy must negotiate an obstacle course of wildly unpredictable events with a crew of even more wildly unpredictable characters, including his just-ex lover, a hot-blooded fugitive from Kansas; the twitchy widow of the frozen arm; two avariciously optimistic real-estate speculators; the Bahamian voodoo witch known as the Dragon Queen, whose suitors are blinded unto death by her peculiar charms; Yancy's new true love, a kinky coroner; and the eponymous bad monkey, who with hilarious aplomb earns his place among Carl Hiaasen's greatest characters.
Here is Hiaasen doing what he does better than anyone else: spinning a tale at once fiercely pointed and wickedly funny in which the greedy, the corrupt, and the degraders of what's left of pristine Florida--now, of the Bahamas as well--get their comeuppance in mordantly ingenious, diabolically entertaining fashion.
From the Hardcover edition.
Author Notes
Carl Hiaasen was born in Fort Lauderdale, Florida on March 12, 1953. He received a degree in journalism from the University of Florida in 1974. He has been a reporter and columnist for the Miami Herald since 1976, and is known for exposing scandal and corruption throughout southern Florida. He has received numerous state and national honors for his journalism and commentary including the Damon Runyon Award from the Denver Press Club. His work has also appeared in numerous magazines including Sports Illustrated, Playboy, Time, Life, Esquire and Gourmet.
His best-selling novels include Double Whammy, Skin Tight, Native Tongue, Stormy Weather, Lucky You, Sick Puppy, Basket Case, Nature Girl and Razor Girl. His 1993 novel, Striptease, was adapted as a film in 1996 starring Demi Moore and Burt Reynolds. He also writes children's books including Hoot, which was awarded a Newbery Honor; Flush; and Scat. Hoot was adapted into a film in 2006. His non-fiction works include Team Rodent; The Downhill Lie: A Hacker's Return to a Ruinous Sport; and two collections of his newspaper columns entitled Kick Ass and Paradise Screwed. In 2013 his titles Chomp and Bad Monkey made The New York Times bestseller list. In 2014, his non-fiction title Dance of the Reptiles made it to the New York Times bestseller list. Skink - No Surrender made the New York Times bestseller list in 2014.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Hiaasen (Star Island) combines familiar themes with an inspired cast in this exercise in Florida zaniness. Andrew Yancy, who became an ex-cop after publicly assaulting his girlfriend's husband with a vacuum cleaner attachment, is now on "roach patrol" as a restaurant inspector, but he soon gets a chance at redemption. Sonny Summers, the new Monroe County sheriff, tells Yancy to take a severed, shark-bitten arm snagged by a fisherman to Miami, where DNA identifies the limb as belonging to Nick Stripling, a retiree in his 40s whose boat was wrecked at sea. Stripling's grown daughter, Caitlin Cox, claims after the funeral that her hated stepmother murdered her father, and Yancy sees proving the stepmother's guilt as a way to return to the force. Add in some real estate shenanigans, a voodoo witch, and a deranged monkey, and you have another marvelously entertaining Hiaasen adventure. Author tour. Announced first printing of 250,000. Agent: Esther Newberg, ICM. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Booklist reviews of recent Hiaasen novels (Nature Girl, 2006) have noted his step back from apocalyptic plots. That trend continues with a shambolic comic tale of garden-variety Florida crime: a wealthy Medicare fraudster appears to have died in a boating accident. The only evidence of death is his arm, which is reeled in by a hapless vacationer. Enter Andrew Yancy, once and future Monroe County detective. He thinks the fraudster was murdered by his wife, and if he can prove it, he can get his old job back and leave restaurant inspections behind. Think of Yancy as a Hiaasenian knight aberrant. He means well, but many of his problems are hilariously self-inflicted. His efforts take him from Key West to Miami to Andros Island, Bahamas, and back again. A huge cast of characters and a stunningly polyfurcated plot offer Hiaasen room to wow readers with information on grave robbery, restaurant-kitchen horrors, autoerotic asphyxiation, and even tips for beating Homeland Security's radar to fly into South Florida. And there is also a delightful interlude of canoodling on the tuna tower of a Key West charter boat as well as no-holds-barred portraits of the Dragon Queen a loopy, libidinous, old Bahamian woo-doo practitioner and the titular Bad Monkey. Plot convolutions twice cause him to insert multipage explanations of what's going on, but as always, Hiaasen is laugh-out-loud funny and thoroughly entertaining. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Hiaasen's crime fiction crossed over to mainstream bestsellerdom early on in his career, and his fan base continues to grow.--Gaughan, Thomas Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
Any fears that Carl Hiaasen might be mellowing are put to rest by BAD MONKEY (Knopf, $26.95), another rollicking misadventure in the colorful annals of greed and corruption in South Florida. As "the Medicare-fraud capital of America," this is the promised land for those erstwhile "mortgage brokers, identity thieves, arms dealers, inside traders and dope smugglers" who have found more lucrative careers in the health care racket. One swindler, Nicky Stripling, made millions billing Medicare for nonexistent motorized scooters he called Super Rollies. But his luck must have run out, because a tourist trolling for blackfin tuna near Key West has hauled in a hairy (and slightly chewed) human arm traceable via DNA to Stripling. The arm is duly delivered to Miami, "the floating-human-body-parts capital of America," but for reasons that make sense only in a Carl Hiaasen novel, it spends time among the Popsicles in Andrew Yancy's freezer. Smart but hotheaded, Yancy is on suspension from-the county sheriff's office, busted from detective to restaurant inspector. As Yancy sees it, his only hope of getting off "roach patrol" is to make the case, advanced by Stripling's avaricious daughter, that her father's death was no boating accident but a well-planned murder by her nowfilthy-rich stepmother. Meanwhile, Yancy's own homicidal impulses have been stimulated by the next-door neighbor who's building a monumental 7,000-square-foot spec house that will tower over every ramshackle habitat on modest Big Pine Key and, not incidentally, block Yancy's view of the sunset. So he periodically drops off a gift - a dead raccoon, a hive of angry bees, an ominous Santeria shrine, a homeless couple - calculated to scare off potential buyers. Another environmental disaster is under way on Andros Island, an unspoiled Caribbean paradise where the widow Stripling has been sighted in the company of her new boyfriend, a real estate developer intent on building a luxury resort on land snatched from a local fisherman named Neville Stafford. Hiaasen has a peculiar genius for inventing grotesque creatures - like the monstrous voodoo woman known as the Dragon Queen and Driggs, a scrofulous monkey "with a septic disposition" - that spring from the darkest impulses of the id. But he also writes great heroes like Yancy and Neville, who stand up to the "greedy intruders destroying something rare, something that couldn't be replaced." Every Jeffery Deaver thriller poses a daunting challenge - for his forensics expert Lincoln Rhyme as much as for the reader. In THE KILL ROOM (Grand Central, $28), the quadriplegic investigator is frustrated to find himself "a crime scene expert without a crime scene," stuck in his retrofitted Manhattan town-house crime lab while the political assassination he's been asked to investigate took place hundreds of miles away, on the Bahamian island of New Providence. Rhyme finds an ingenious solution to that problem, leaving his colleagues to wrestle with the ethical issue of why a government agency should be involved in a pre-emptive attack on a possible terrorist. Another hallmark of a Deaver novel is the creep factor - creating a villain worthy of becoming Rhyme's adversary. Here it's Jacob Swann, a sadistic killer who gets information from his victims by . . . never mind. What makes Swann such sick fun is that he's also a fantastic cook, full of helpful tips about making a roux or a rib-eye hash, as well as a practiced butcher who uses the same Japanese chef's knife to . . . never mind. Ace Atkins's killing honesty sets a new standard for Southern crime novels. Gone is the fuzzy nostalgia for the old hometown, switched out for a more authentic look at the modern "Mayberry of domestic violence, drug use, child endangerment and roadhouse brawls." That's the world Quinn Colson stepped into when he came home from tours of duty in Afghanistan and Iraq to Jericho, Miss., in rural Tibbehah County. In THE BROKEN PLACES (Putnam, $26.95), the former Army Ranger is now county sheriff and the go-to guy when a pair of inmates break out of Parchman prison and head for Jericho to reclaim the loot from a robbery. The locals are assertive people, vivid enough to hold their own in settings like Mr. Jim's barbershop and the River, the church started by a repentant convict who now "believed in everything he read from the Bible or learned from Johnny Cash." They're even strong enough to withstand a killer tornado. Now here's a quandary: should Jo Nesbo's American fans hang in there until his first novel, THE BAT (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, paper, $14.95), finally comes out here next month? Or should we snatch up a later novel, THE REDEEMER (Knopf, $25.95), published in Norway before this hard-boiled writer became a global phenomenon? Written in Nesbo's distinctive fast-and-furious style, "The Redeemer" offers insight into the surly attitude that defines Harry Hole, Nesbo's abrasive Oslo detective, who functions best when he's flying solo. ("You can't be in the police for 12 years without being infected by the contempt for humanity that comes with the territory.") The plot is nice and tricky, involving the murder of a Salvation Army "soldier" at the height of the Christmas season and hanging on the identity of a villain known as "the little redeemer" during the fighting in Croatia. Whichever you choose, be assured that both books were translated by Don Bartlett, who seems to relish this tough stuff as much as we do. It's no surprise that Carl Hiaasen's Miami is 'the floating-human-body-parts capital of America.'
Guardian Review
From its opening page, there is a confidence, economy and enjoyability to Bad Monkey that give the impression of a writer back in love with his franchise. A couple on a honeymoon fishing trip in the Florida Keys reel in a severed arm, which, for reasons of policing logistics, comes to be kept in the freezer of Andrew Yancy, a former detective who has been downgraded to restaurant inspector ("roach patrol"). Seeing the arm as a possible leg-up back to the force, Yancy traces the connections to the Bahamas, where vivid characters include a voodoo-obsessed eccentric with a pet monkey that he claims has appeared in the Pirates of the Caribbean films. People and plot, however, are secondary to Hiaasen's jauntily barbed narrative voice. Sentences seem to have escaped from an anti-guidebook to Florida. A condominium Yancy inspects has a "a polyp-shaped swimming pool with a slightly discoloured kiddie pond". Elsewhere, we learn why the cops regard born-again Christians as the most dangerous drivers and of the "low-pirate" tricks of sports-fishing crews. - Mark Lawson From its opening page, there is a confidence, economy and enjoyability to Bad Monkey that give the impression of a writer back in love with his franchise. - Mark Lawson.
Kirkus Review
A severed arm that a visiting angler hooks off Key West kicks off Hiaasen's 13th criminal comedy. Though he's anything but eager to follow Monroe County Sheriff Sonny Summers' bidding and drive the arm to Miami to see if it belonged to some local stiff, the encounter Andrew Yancy has with Miami Assistant Medical Examiner Rosa Campesino, which ends with him taking the arm back home and parking it in his freezer, starts to change his attitude toward the case. Unfortunately, it doesn't change the fact that he's been suspended from the Sheriff's Department and banished to the gruesome post of restaurant inspector. But once the arm is identified as that of developer Nicholas Stripling, Yancy, calling himself "Inspector Yancy," takes it on himself to question Nicky's wife, Eve, his estranged daughter, Caitlin Cox, Eve's sworn enemy, and several other concerned parties. When two of these parties are shot to death very shortly after their chats with Yancy, he knows he's onto something, even though the imperviously obtuse Sonny Summers doesn't. Leaving behind his "future former girlfriend" Bonnie Witt, who's just revealed an unexpectedly colorful personal history to him, Yancy takes Rosa along to follow the arm's trail to Lizard Cay, Bahamas, where more crazies await: a toothless voodoo priestess called the Dragon Queen, her hapless client Neville Stafford, whose troubles bear an uncanny resemblance to Yancy's own, and his companion Driggs, a monkey reputed to have worked on the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. The mind-boggling plot will require yet another Hiaasen hurricane, a house fire, several perp walks for diverse felonies and a healthy dose of cleansing violence to bring down the curtain. Not as funny as Hiaasen's best (Star Island, 2010, etc.), with a title character more vicious than amusing, but still the gold standard for South Florida criminal farce.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Excerpts
Excerpts
One On the hottest day of July, trolling in dead-calm waters near Key West, a tourist named James Mayberry reeled up a human arm. His wife flew to the bow of the boat and tossed her breakfast burritos. "What're you waiting for?" James Mayberry barked at the mate."Get that thing off my line!" The kid tugged and twisted, but the barb of the hook was imbedded in bone. Finally the captain came down from the bridge and used bent-nose pliers to free the decomposing limb, which he placed on shaved ice in a deck box. James Mayberry said, "For Christ's sake, now where are we supposed to put our fish?" "We'll figure that out when you actually catch one." It had been a tense outing aboard the Misty Momma IV. James Mayberry had blown three good strikes because he was unable to absorb instruction. Dragging baits in the ocean was different than jigging for walleyes in the lake back home. "Don't we need to call somebody?" he asked the captain. "We do." The hairy left arm was bloated and sunburned to the hue of eggplant. A cusp of yellowed humerus protruded at the point of separation, below the shoulder. The flesh surrounding the wound looked ragged and bloodless. "Yo, check it out!" the mate said. "What now?" James Mayberry asked. "His freakin' finger, dude." The victim's hand was contracted into a first except for the middle digit, which was rigidly extended. "How weird is that ? He's flippin' us off," the mate said. The captain told him to re-bait the angler's hook. "Has this ever happened out here before?" James Mayberry said. "Tell the truth." "You should go see about your wife." "Jesus, I'll never hear the end of it. Louisa wanted to ride the Conch Train today. She did not want to come fishing." "Well, son," the captain said, "we're in the memory-making business." He climbed back to the bridge, radioed the Coast Guard and gave the GPS coordinates of the gruesome find. He was asked to remain in the area and look for other pieces of the body. "But I got a charter," he said. "You can stay at it," the Coast Guard dispatcher advised. "Just keep your eyes open." After calming herself, Louisa Mayberry informed her husband that she wished to return to Key West right away. "Come on, sugar. It's a beautiful morning." James Mayberry didn't want to go back to the dock with no fish to hang on the spikes--not after shelling out a grand to hire the boat. "The first day of our honeymoon, and this ! Aren't you sketched out?" James Mayberry peeked under the lid of the fish box. "You watch CSI all the time. It's the same type of deal." His wife grimaced but did not turn away. She remarked that the limb didn't look real. "Oh, it's real," said James Mayberry, somewhat defensively. "Just take a whiff." Snagging a fake arm wouldn't make for as good a story. A real arm was pure gold, major high-fives from all his peeps back in Madison. You caught a what ? No way, bro! Louisa Mayberry's gaze was fixed on the limb. "What could have happened?" she asked. "Tiger shark," her husband said matter-of-factly. "Is that a wedding band on his hand? This is so sad." "Fish on!" the mate called. "Who's up?" James Mayberry steered his bride to the fighting chair and the mate fitted the rod into the gimbal. Although she was petite, Louisa Mayberry owned a strong upper body due to rigorous Bikram yoga classes that she took on Tuesday nights. Refusing assistance, she pumped in an eleven-pound blackfi n tuna and whooped triumphantly as it flopped on the deck. Her husband had never seen her so excited. "Here, take a picture!" she cried to the mate, and handed over her iPhone. "Hold on," James Mayberry said. "Get both of us together." Louisa watched him hustle to get ready. "Really, Jimmy? Really?" Moments later the captain glanced down from the bridge and saw the mate snapping photographs of the newlyweds posed side by side at the transom. Their matching neon blue Oakley wraparounds were propped on their matching cap visors, and their fair Wisconsin noses practically glowed with sunblock. Louisa Mayberry was gamely hoisting by the tail her sleek silvery tuna while James Mayberry wore the mate's crusty gloves to grip his rancid catch, its middle finger aimed upward toward the puffy white clouds. The captain dragged on a cigarette and turned back to the wheel. "Another fucking day in paradise," he said. Excerpted from Bad Monkey by Carl Hiaasen All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
