Bad Monkey (novel)

This article is about the novel by Carl Hiaasen. For the novel by Matt Ruff, see Bad Monkeys.
Bad Monkey
AuthorCarl Hiaasen
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
PublisherAlfred A. Knopf
Publication date
2013
Media typePrint (hardback & paperback)
Preceded byStar Island 
Followed byRazor Girl 

Bad Monkey is a 2013 novel by Carl Hiaasen.

Plot summary

In mid-July, a sportfisherman tourist off the Florida Keys reels in a severed human arm. The Monroe County Sheriff Sonny Summers, who is hyper-sensitive to any publicity threat to the Keys' tourist trade, asks a former detective named Andrew Yancy to transport the arm to Miami immediately and ensure that any investigation is handled by the Dade County authorities. In Miami, Yancy meets Dr. Rosa Campesino, the Assistant Dade County coroner. As he predicted, she tells him there is not enough evidence to connect the severed arm with any unsolved crimes in Dade County. Yancy's colleague Rogelio Burton advises him to drop the arm on the roadside on his way home, but Yancy rebelliously decides to keep it preserved in his home's freezer.

Yancy is currently on suspension, having assaulted the husband of his lover, Bonnie Witt, and is forced to work as a Health Inspector for the department of Hotels and Restaurants. During their last night together, before she and her husband move to Sarasota, Bonnie confesses that her real name is Plover Chase, and she is a fugitive from Oklahoma, a former high school teacher indicted for extorting sex from one of her underage students in exchange for giving him good grades in her AP English class.

A woman, Eve Stripling, returns from a vacation in Europe and reports her husband, Nicholas "Nick" Stripling, missing. A DNA test quickly matches the severed arm with Nick, who Eve says likely died in a boating accident. A funeral is held for him and his arm is buried. However, Yancy becomes suspicious at Eve's lack of grief, and more suspicious when Caitlin, Nick's daughter and Eve's step-daughter, angrily insists that Eve killed her father for his money.

Seeking redemption with the police force, Yancy investigates further. He was at the same restaurant and bar as the mate from the fishing boat that found the arm, Charles Phinney, when he is shot to death. His distraught girlfriend Madeline admits to Yancy that a woman matching Eve's description gave him the severed arm and paid him to hook it on the tourist's fishing line. Investigating Stripling's medical supply company leads Yancy to a corrupt former surgeon named Gomez O'Peele who admits that Stripling was defrauding Medicare out of millions of dollars. Inside the Striplings' Florida vacation home, Yancy finds a hatchet and traces of blood, as well as bone splinters in the drain. He suspects that Eve killed her husband in the town house, then arranged for the arm to be found so he could be declared legally dead.

However, Yancy's boss, the Sheriff, has no interest in pursuing the case any further, and Caitlin is delighted to abandon her suspicions as soon as Eve offers her half of Nick's life insurance. Both of them tell Yancy to abandon his investigation, but he refuses. A short time later, he is ambushed in his backyard, beaten, and nearly drowned by a masked man fitting the description of the mate's killer. Additionally, he notices that the man is wearing an expensive Tourbillon watch that matches the one that was absent but left a print on the arm.

Rosa Campesino has been assisting Yancy with his investigation, and the two of them grow closer and eventually develop a sexual relationship. She agrees to accompany him on an undercover trip to the island of Andros, where Eve and a mysterious male companion are developing a vacation resort.

On Andros, Yancy finds an unexpected ally in Neville Stafford, a Bahamian fisherman whose property was sold against his wishes to the new resort development, after which he returned to his longtime family beachfront home one day to find it demolished. Neville was so desperate to stop the development that he asked a local witch, the "Dragon Queen," to put a voodoo curse on the developer, Christopher Grunion. Neville even parts with his only companion, a capuchin monkey named Driggs, who is traded to the Dragon Queen. Christopher is believed to be the mysterious boyfriend of Eve Stripling, whom Yancy has tracked via his seaplane registry as well as a record of the last phone call made by Gomez O’ Peele before his death, provided by Rosa Campesino. Both provide the name Christopher Grunion.

Rosa volunteers to visit the Grunions alone, posing as a wealthy American interested in buying one of the future resort homes. While waiting, Yancy converses with Neville, who mentions that he stole some personal items from Grunion's garbage to give to the Dragon Queen, including fishing shirt sleeves that had been neatly cut off. Suddenly understanding, Yancy rushes to the Grunion house, but is held at gunpoint by Christopher Grunion, who is revealed to be Nick Stripling, alive and missing his left arm.

Like many Medicare fraudsters facing indictment, Nick decided he had to fake his own death to escape prosecution. Unlike others, he decided to "foolproof" the deception by leaving behind actual human remains, instead of simply disappearing. Stripling had his arm amputated by Gomez O’Peele, and then had Eve plant it in Florida, before declaring him legally dead. Yancy delays his death by capturing Eve's little dog Tillie, knowing that Eve would be very distressed and would beg her husband not to shoot. Once Stripling lost his patience, he was about shoot Yancy but is ambushed by Neville, who stabs him in the spine with the broken shaft of a fishing rod Yancy brought with him. Fleeing the estate, Yancy and Neville run to the Dragon Queen's hut, where Stripling's hired thug named Egg took Rosa. They rescue her and Driggs, and Yancy threatens Stripling's own pilot into flying him and Rosa back to Miami.

Nick, rendered almost paraplegic by the injury to his spine, lays all the blame on Eve for stopping him from shooting, who retaliates by murdering him and dumping his body at sea at night, to be devoured by sharks. All that remains is his right arm, which gets buried with his left. Attempting to speed away from the scene, Eve herself is killed when her boat crashes on a nearby reef.

Returning home, Yancy's life is complicated by the reappearance of Bonnie Witt/Plover Chase, who left her husband and traveled back to Oklahoma to "re-connect" with her teenage lover, Cody Parish, now a lazy 30-year-old man. It took only a few days for Bonnie to grow tired of his lack of ambition, and pine for Yancy again. Having heard that Yancy already found another girlfriend, she decided to show her devotion to Yancy by burning down a spec home next to Yancy's that was hindering his view of the sunset. The Florida authorities offer to extradite her to Oklahoma, but she insists on staying in Florida to fight the arson charges. Yancy is secretly delighted that the spec home is gone, but he has no further interest in Bonnie. The OSBI agent sent to arrest Bonnie predicts that, before long, she will realize this and accept the extradition deal.

The Monroe County Sheriff reluctantly gives Yancy credit for solving the severed arm case, but tells him that, because of the publicity surrounding Bonnie, it will be at least another year or two before it will be safe to reinstate Yancy as a detective. Yancy is disappointed, but happy to be in a steady relationship with Rosa. Back on Andros, Neville reclaims his home after the Striplings' resort project collapses.

Characters
  • Andrew Yancy: The protagonist, a former Miami-Dade Police detective, currently on suspension from the Monroe County Sheriff's office working as an inspector for the Monroe County Division of Hotels and Restaurants ("Roach Patrol", as Yancy puts it).
  • Dr. Rosa Campesino: The Assistant Miami-Dade County coroner. Intelligent and determined, but burdened with a kinky streak that has worried some of her former lovers (one of whom broke up with her after she convinced him to have sex with her on an autopsy table in the morgue).
  • Plover Chase/Bonnie Witt: Yancy's "future former girlfriend," the wife of a prominent Key West dermatologist. Formerly Plover Chase, an Oklahoma high school teacher indicted for having a sexual affair with one of her students.
  • Eve Stripling: widow of the late Nicholas Stripling, who appears to claim her husband's severed arm.
  • Nicholas Stripling/Christopher Grunion: Eve's husband, and the owner of the severed arm; a Medicare fraudster now living undercover under an assumed name to avoid prosecution.
  • Caitlin Stripling-Cox: Nicholas Stripling's estranged daughter, a former model and recovering drug addict. Loathes her stepmother only slightly more than her father.
  • Simon Cox: Caitlin's husband, an ex-military serviceman now working in security.
  • Neville Stafford: A Bahamian fisherman, whose modest beachfront home is purchased and then demolished by the neighboring resort development named Curly Tail Lane.
  • "The Dragon Queen": A voodoo witch on the island of Andros.
  • Evan Shook: A real-estate developer from New York State who has built a spec home next to Yancy's property, and is increasingly desperate to sell it.
  • Dr. Gomez O'Peele: a defrocked orthopaedic surgeon, one of Nicholas Stripling's "employees" in his Medicare fraud "business."
  • Charles Phinney: The tattooed youth from the boat that reeled in the severed arm; later shot to death outside a Key West bar.
  • Madeline: Phinney's girlfriend, whom Yancy guesses is 15 years older than Phinney. She is therefore in her 30s.
  • John Wesley Wiedermann: An agent of the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation, sent to Florida to recapture Plover/Bonnie.
  • Cody Parish: Bonnie Witt's former student/lover.
  • Sonny Summers: The Monroe County Sheriff; elected by default, he is indolent, easily overwhelmed, and morbidly afraid of driving away tourists or upsetting the Keys' Chamber of Commerce members.
  • Rogelio Burton: another detective for the Monroe County Sheriff's office, and a friend of Yancy.
  • Tommy Lombardo: Yancy's immediate superior as a health inspector.
  • Brennan: owner of Stoney's Crab Palace, the Keys' most popular restaurant, where Yancy often finds the worst health violations.
  • K.J. Claspers: The Striplings' personal pilot, a retired cocaine smuggler.
  • Carter "Egg" Ecclestone: a hired thug working for the Striplings on Andros.
  • Driggs: Neville's sometime-companion, an incorrigible capuchin monkey, who reportedly worked as one of the monkeys on the Pirates of the Caribbean films.

Critical reception

Mark Lawson of The Guardian praised the book as "a novel highlighted the book's portrayal of Florida, writing that "the greatest pleasure is the feeling that, through long residency and his journalistic beat, Hiaasen owns this location". He also praised it for keeping the author from "becoming a prisoner of style and subject matter", adding that "he has escaped from the bondage of publishing concept and reader expectation to produce a novel that is as enjoyable to read as it seems to have been for him to write".[1]

References
  1. Lawson, Mark (July 10, 2013). "Bad Monkey by Carl Hiaasen – review". The Guardian. Retrieved August 31, 2019.
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