by Carl
Hiaasen (Author)
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.