The honeymooning tourists who had chartered the fishing boat
expected to catch tuna. What they didn’t expect was to reel in a human arm. The
arm was all that was left of Nick Stripling, who died leaving his wife a
large insurance policy and lots more in offshore accounts.
The local sheriff doesn’t want the publicity from the case
to tarnish the image of the Keys, so he asks suspended detective—now county
restaurant inspector—Andrew Yancy to hand it over to the Miami-Dade County
cops. They pass, but the medical
examiner tells Yancy that there’s something fishy about the arm--the amputation
was not caused by a boat propeller or shark bite. When Yancy learns that the
owner of the arm had been a Medicare swindler, he figures solving the case
might just be his ticket back to the job.
But wait: that’s only the main plot of Bad Monkey, Carl Hiaasen’s latest. I didn’t bother to count, but he
has innumerable other plots working at the same time. There’s the sad case of
Neville, whose family’s possession of a Caribbean
beach goes back centuries, but is put off his land by a developer. There’s the
mysterious shooting of a young man who worked on the fishing boat where the arm
was found. And the many calamities that prevent Evan Shook from selling his
spec house—the one that towers over Yancy’s own. Characters? There’s the Dragon Queen, a smelly voodoo
woman whose lovers die mysteriously when they try to break up with her; Bonnie
Witt, nee Plover Chase, wanted for indecent liberties with a minor in Oklahoma, now hot for
Yancy. And Driggs, the nasty little monkey
of the title, whose increasing addictions cause his hair to fall out and his
behavior to worsen.
Yancy is the central character, and like other Hiiassen
characters, he will stop at nothing to stand up for what he believes is right.
If this puts him outside the law, so be it. In this case, he stands up for his
right to enjoy seeing the moon at night, for building codes being enforced, for
clean restaurants free of insects and rodent droppings, for old timers to be
able to live on their land, and for bad guys to get caught.
The book starts off humorously, but in the end, it suffers
from too many plots, too many characters—some with more than one identity—and
too much chaos. I actually found it
tiring—there was simply too much going on. And I wasn’t alone: another a
die-hard Hiaasen fan quit about ¾ of the way through and asked me just to sum
up what had happened to each character. It is telling that I had difficulty
remembering.
I love Hiaasen’s books, but I sure wish he’d limit himself
to just a few plots per book.
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