Bad Monkey by Carl Hiaasen

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Reading a Carl Hiaasen novel is a lot like watching a master pool player put nine balls into a rack, then casually chalk his cue. When he’s ready, he lines up his shot and then expertly smacks that little white cue ball into the other nine. You never know which balls are going to go where, and guessing isn’t going to help. What you want to do is just sit back and watch the master run the board.

‘Bad Monkey’ is Carl Hiaasen at his best. The satire flows in every paragraph, the word choices (and especially the adjectives) convey Hiaasen’s justifiable contempt for a large swath of humanity. Like me, Hiaasen is a native Floridian and, also like me, he is appalled by what greed and empty-minded boosterism has done to the state. When Hiaasen sits down to write, you can be reasonably certain that there are crooked politicians and avaricious developers among the cast of characters. There is also frequently a hurricane. Readers of this book will not be disappointed on any of those counts.

That pool rack of humanity in ‘Bad Monkey’ includes an honest cop who was fired from the Miami PD for being honest, a Bahamian voodoo queen, a fugitive former school teacher from Kansas who is not quite firing on all cylinders, a coroner with a taste for sex in unusual places, a Bahamas man whose home has been sold out from underneath him, a widow who has to conjure up thoughts of her squashed turtle to generate tears for her recently deceased husband, and a capuchin monkey named Driggs who may or may not have had a cameo appearance in Pirates of the Caribbean.

The cue ball that Hiassen drives into this group is the discovery of a human arm, hauled in by a couple from Wisconsin honeymooning in the Florida Keys. Had the arm been landed in Miami, it would have been tossed in with the hundreds of other limbs that accumulate annually from drug deals gone bad or other illegal misadventures. And so as not to tarnish the Keys’ reputation as a wholesome family destination, Andrew Yancey of the Monroe County sheriff’s department (and late of the Miami PD) is tasked with foisting the arm on Miami’s law enforcement establishment.

Thus begins a wonderful tale of good intentions – and not-so-good ones – gone horribly awry. There are no saints in this story (Hiaasen has no use for them). Yancey has been busted from the Monroe County force for wielding a powerful hand vacuum as an extremely dangerous weapon. His punishment is to become a restaurant inspector, and Hiaasen’s description of what Yancey finds in the course of his new job may put readers off dining out for an extended period.

Part of the pleasure of reading Hiaasen is learning about things. ‘Bad Monkey’ provides a tutorial on Medicare fraud, ocean flycasting, the Dead Sailfish Scam, and the inner workings of the simian mind, among other tidbits of knowledge.

The fun is in watching these individual story threads develop and play themselves out. As a reader, you know they’re going to merge; you just don’t know how, when, or with what result.




View all my reviews