Alex McIlvaine '14 Reviews Hiassen's Latest: Bad Monkey

Easily digested, Bad Monkey is a fusion between satire and mystery. The novel’s focus bounces between the Florida Keys, Miami and the Bahamas. Hiassen simultaneously develops multiple characters and plot lines that ultimately intersect. Hiassen’s protagonist, Andrew Yancy, is an eccentric suspended cop who has been graced with the duty of restaurant roach patrol. The reader finds Yancy accompanied, along with an excess of rodent feces and hundreds of roaches, by a severed human arm. The arm leads Yancy down a path he could never have anticipated - one that could save his job. Meanwhile, a Bahamian fisherman by the name of Neville Stafford is woken by the clank of a bulldozer tearing down his house - a project that is far more connected to Yancy’s severed arm than the reader could predict. Hiassen provides hilarious, gripping action: the monkey from “The Pirates of the Caribbean” movies strips a man of his reproductive capability, construction sites are vandalized by disturbing, creative means, an Oklahoma teacher who sexually exploited one of her students burns down a house, a couple makes love in a morgue and much more. Bad Monkey is another of Carl Hiassen’s many underdog stories in which the little guy overcomes the corrupt bureaucracy.