Bad Monkey

April 22, 2013
Hiaasen (Star Island) combines familiar themes with an inspired cast in this exercise in Florida zaniness. Andrew Yancy, who became an ex-cop after publicly assaulting his girlfriend’s husband with a vacuum cleaner attachment, is now on “roach patrol” as a restaurant inspector, but he soon gets a chance at redemption. Sonny Summers, the new Monroe County sheriff, tells Yancy to take a severed, shark-bitten arm snagged by a fisherman to Miami, where DNA identifies the limb as belonging to Nick Stripling, a retiree in his 40s whose boat was wrecked at sea. Stripling’s grown daughter, Caitlin Cox, claims after the funeral that her hated stepmother murdered her father, and Yancy sees proving the stepmother’s guilt as a way to return to the force. Add in some real estate shenanigans, a voodoo witch, and a deranged monkey, and you have another marvelously entertaining Hiaasen adventure. Author tour. Announced first printing of 250,000. Agent: Esther Newberg, ICM.

June 15, 2013
A severed arm that a visiting angler hooks off Key West kicks off Hiaasen's 13th criminal comedy. Though he's anything but eager to follow Monroe County Sheriff Sonny Summers' bidding and drive the arm to Miami to see if it belonged to some local stiff, the encounter Andrew Yancy has with Miami Assistant Medical Examiner Rosa Campesino, which ends with him taking the arm back home and parking it in his freezer, starts to change his attitude toward the case. Unfortunately, it doesn't change the fact that he's been suspended from the Sheriff's Department and banished to the gruesome post of restaurant inspector. But once the arm is identified as that of developer Nicholas Stripling, Yancy, calling himself "Inspector Yancy," takes it on himself to question Nicky's wife, Eve, his estranged daughter, Caitlin Cox, Eve's sworn enemy, and several other concerned parties. When two of these parties are shot to death very shortly after their chats with Yancy, he knows he's onto something, even though the imperviously obtuse Sonny Summers doesn't. Leaving behind his "future former girlfriend" Bonnie Witt, who's just revealed an unexpectedly colorful personal history to him, Yancy takes Rosa along to follow the arm's trail to Lizard Cay, Bahamas, where more crazies await: a toothless voodoo priestess called the Dragon Queen, her hapless client Neville Stafford, whose troubles bear an uncanny resemblance to Yancy's own, and his companion Driggs, a monkey reputed to have worked on the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. The mind-boggling plot will require yet another Hiaasen hurricane, a house fire, several perp walks for diverse felonies and a healthy dose of cleansing violence to bring down the curtain. Not as funny as Hiaasen's best (Star Island, 2010, etc.), with a title character more vicious than amusing, but still the gold standard for South Florida criminal farce.

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Starred review from May 1, 2013
Booklist reviews of recent Hiaasen novels (Nature Girl, 2006) have noted his step back from apocalyptic plots. That trend continues with a shambolic comic tale of garden-variety Florida crime: a wealthy Medicare fraudster appears to have died in a boating accident. The only evidence of death is his arm, which is reeled in by a hapless vacationer. Enter Andrew Yancy, once and future Monroe County detective. He thinks the fraudster was murdered by his wife, and if he can prove it, he can get his old job back and leave restaurant inspections behind. Think of Yancy as a Hiaasenian knight aberrant. He means well, but many of his problems are hilariously self-inflicted. His efforts take him from Key West to Miami to Andros Island, Bahamas, and back again. A huge cast of characters and a stunningly polyfurcated plot offer Hiaasen room to wow readers with information on grave robbery, restaurant-kitchen horrors, autoerotic asphyxiation, and even tips for beating Homeland Security's radar to fly into South Florida. And there is also a delightful interlude of canoodling on the tuna tower of a Key West charter boat as well as no-holds-barred portraits of the Dragon Queena loopy, libidinous, old Bahamian woo-doo practitionerand the titular Bad Monkey. Plot convolutions twice cause him to insert multipage explanations of what's going on, but as always, Hiaasen is laugh-out-loud funny and thoroughly entertaining. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Hiaasen's crime fiction crossed over to mainstream bestsellerdom early on in his career, and his fan base continues to grow.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)