Bad Monkey

It's been a few years between Carl Hiaasen's novels for adults, the kind that feature stupid criminals and good-hearted heroes who would just like a nice view of the sunset and some sex with a nice-looking lady. Bad Monkey follows this template, and while it's generally enjoyable, I found Hiassen's mechanics a little familiar.

The book opens with one of his classic paragraphs: "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." That arm will be the object that sets everything in motion. Andrew Yancey, a former cop busted down to restaurant inspector, takes the arm to Miami, where a luscious coroner does what she can with it. Andrew and the coroner will hook up and deduce that the owner of the arm, a man named Nick Stripling, was murdered. They are only part right.

All of Hiaasen's books are set in Florida, and this one is mostly in the Keys, though major portions are set in the Bahamas. Florida has replaced California as the place where the weirdest and most despicable events take place, and Hiaasen has digested them all for his books. In this book, in addition to a severed arm, we have a mysterious killer wearing an orange poncho, a woman who practices voodoo and puts curses on men who refuse to sleep with her, and most of all, a monkey bereft of fur who starred with Johnny Depp in The Pirates of the Caribbean.

Hiaasen packs this book with so much stuff it overflows. There are side plots involving Yancey's ex, a woman with the name of Plover Chase, a crooked real estate speculator building a house next to Yancey's that is taller than the building code allows, and a Bahamian who has had his home taken by a ruthless developer (Hiaasen is always with the humble and true). It goes on about fifty pages longer than it needs to, and strains under the weight of its absurd plot. I really can't read, with a straight face, a situation where a man has a gun pointed at him but somehow gets out of it unscathed.

But Hiaasen has the gift of adding so much absurd detail that one can't help but chuckle: "Sergeant Mendez denied all wrongdoing but was quietly reassigned to the K-9 division. Soon thereafter he was bitten in the groin by a Belgian shepherd trainee named Kong, and he required three operations, culminating in a scrotal graft from a Brahma steer." In a bit of foreshadowing, another man's penis will be bitten by the monkey.

Hiaasen also gives us some insights into life in Key West: "The typical Key West murder is a drunken altercation over debts, dope or dance partners. Premeditated robbery-homicides are rare because they require a level of planning and sober enterprise seldom encountered among the island's indolent felons."

You can't be too hard on Hiaasen. I think he knows exactly what he's up to, and is winking at us. Consider this passage, where he indicates he knows how ridiculous this all is: "What are the odds of getting randomly stabbed in your own yard during a hurricane? While holding a loaded shotgun?"