Bad Monkey by Carl Hiaasen

My main reading guilty pleasure includes several former (or current) newspaper journalists turned novelists.  Pete Dexter, Jennifer Weiner, and Carl Hiaasen tops the list.  According to the author's bio in his latest novel, Bad Monkey, Hiaasen was born and raised in Florida and has authored 12 novels.  He also has four children's books, four works of non fiction, and four co-authored novels.  Carl still writes a column for The Miami Herald.  While I am not a big fan of murder mysteries, something about Hiaasen's style draws me in again and again.  I have now read five of his novels and enjoyed everyone.

Andrew Yancy is a skinny homicide detective who assaults his lover’s husband when he abuses her.  The wealthy man threatens a law suit, and Yancy is demoted to “roach patrol,” or restaurant inspector as punishment.  When a fishing boat lands a human arm, Yancy is asked to take it to the Miami Medical Examiner.  The police chief of sleepy, quiet Big Pine Key hopes the case will go away.  He has no desire to take on a homicide investigation.  The ME examines the limb but refuses to keep it.  Against instructions from the chief, Yancy takes it home and stores it in his freezer.  The incident is labeled a “boating accident.”  A couple of shootings occur and they seem to be unrelated, but the detective in Yancy is not so sure.  He begins accumulating clues.

A sub-plot involves the construction of a monstrous summer home, which provides some comic relief – although Yancy himself is pretty comical.  Throw in the Dragon Queen – a voodoo priestess -- a man angered by the destruction of his family home, and a nasty little monkey, and the reader is in for a rollicking ride.

Hiaasen always draws interesting and eccentric characters.  He writes, “The phone kept ringing, but Yancy didn’t answer it.  He was drinking rum, sitting in a plastic lawn chair.  From next door came the offensive buzz of wood saws and the metallic pops of a nail gun.  The absentee owner of the property was erecting an enormous spec house that had no spiritual place on Big Pine Key, and furthermore interfered with Yancy’s modest view of the sunset.  It was Yancy’s fantasy to burn the place down as soon as the roof framing was finished. // He heard a car stop in his driveway but didn’t rise from the chair.  His visitor was a fellow detective, Rogelio Burton.  // ‘Why don’t you pick up your phone?’ Burton said. // ‘You believe that monstrosity? It’s like a [damn] mausoleum.’ // Burton sat down beside him. // [The Police Chief] wants you to take a road trip.’ // ‘Miami?’” 

Like most heroes asked to embark on an adventure, Yancy at first declines, but he then decides he better go north in the hope getting his badge back.

Like all good mystery writers, Carl Hiaasen’s latest novel slowly reveals the truth of the wayward arm.  Bad Monkey will satisfy anyone’s thirst for a good old whodunit.  5 stars

--Chiron, 8/13/15

Lucky You by Carl Hiaasen

Carl Hiaasen has a distinguished career as a newspaper reporter in Miami, Florida. Like Pete Dexter – a former columnist for the Philadelphia Daily News -- he turned his hand to novels. I have read about six of Hiaasen’s works and thoroughly enjoyed them all. His stories are gritty and down to earth, and have that special something which sounds a lot like newspaper writing. This 1997 novel, Hiaasen’s 7th, is no exception.

Tom Krome has been relegated to covering mall openings, beauty pageants, and, in this case, the story of a woman who won $14 million in the Florida Lottery. Hiaasen writes, “The downsizing trend that swept newspapers in the early nineties was aimed at sustaining the bloated profit margins in which the newspaper industry had wallowed for most of the century. A new soulless breed of cooperate managers, unburdened by a passion for serious journalism, found an easy way to reduce the cost of publishing a daily newspaper. The first casualty was depth. … Cutting the amount of space devoted to news instantly justified cutting the staff” (21). Investigative teams were one of the first cuts these business types made.

Krome was just “peaking in his career as an investigative reporter” (21). He applied for a job as a “feature writer” for The Register. He was offered a job as a divorce columnist, which he declined. A week later, the managing editor offered him a job as a feature writer, which Krome accepted, since he was trying to save for a move to Alaska.

Meanwhile, JoLayne Lucks won half of a $28 million dollar lottery prize. The other half was won by a white supremacist in Miami, who was furious he had to share the prize with what he was sure was a member of one of Florida’s two major minority groups. His plan was to start a militia to protect the US from a NATO and UN led invasion of the US to eliminate all the white people from America. The lunatic conspiracy theories which came out of Bode Gazzer’s twisted mind were just that – sheer lunacy. His partner in this insanity was Chub, a trigger-happy racist, who occasionally expressed some skepticism about Bode’s theories but liked the idea of being part of a militia.

Bode and Chub decide to steal JoLayne’s ticket. They find her shortly before Tom Krome does, and the two set out to track the thieves and recover her ticket. This is the main plot, but a humorous sub-plot involves Lucks’ hometown of Grange, Florida and some crazy con-artists running a religious miracle racket. All this is revealed in about the first 20 pages, so I am not giving much away.

Lucky You is exciting and takes many unexpected twists and turns. I am not really a fan of mysteries and suspense stories, but the newspaper angle intrigues me, so I am working my way through Hiaasen’s work. This novel, like the others I have read, are great stories, with several interesting characters ranging from serious to funny to the bizarre. 5 stars

--Chiron, 6/10/12