Bad Monkey (novel)

Bad Monkey is a 2013 novel by Carl Hiaasen.

Cover Description

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 Oklahoma; 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.

Plot Summary

In mid-July, a sportfisherman off the Florida Keys reels in a severed human arm. The Monroe County Sheriff, who is hyper-sensitive to any publicity threat to the Keys' tourist trade, details one of his detectives, Andrew Yancy, to transport the arm to Miami immediately and ensure that any investigation is handled by the Dade County authorities.

Andrew Yancy was formerly a detective for the Miami-Dade Police, but was terminated after trying to inform on a corrupt, but well-connected, colleague. After moving to the Keys, he commenced a steamy love affair with a married woman, Bonnie Witt. After Bonnie's husband discovered the affair, he called Bonnie a crude name in public, causing Yancy to attack him in an unusual way (sodomizing him with a vacuum cleaner) in full view of a crowd in Mallory Square. Yancy is currently on suspension from the Sheriff's Office, while facing criminal assault charges. In his spare time he fishes the shoreline behind his house, and is secretly working to sabotage the construction and sale of an over-sized spec home next to his property that is ruining his view of the sunset.

In Miami, Yancy meets the attractive 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 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 dejected when Bonnie ends their affair, telling him that she is moving with her husband to Sarasota. As a "parting gift", she tells him a naughty secret: her real name is Plover Chase and she is actually a fugitive from Oklahoma, a former high school teacher indicted for extorting sex from one of her underage students in exchange for favorable grades. She has also convinced her husband to reduce the charges against Yancy to a misdemeanor and give Yancy a chance at getting his job back. But the Sheriff tells Yancy that, before then, he must work as a Health Inspector for the department of Hotels and Restaurants. Seeing the egregious health violations at several of the Keys' most popular eateries, Yancy quickly loses his appetite, even at home.

The wisdom of Yancy's actions is borne out when a woman, Eve Stripling, returns from a vacation in Europe and reports her husband, Nicholas, missing. A DNA test quickly matches the missing Nicholas to the severed arm. Yancy turns the arm over to Eve, who says that her husband likely fell off his boat and drowned, and his body was dismembered by sharks. Yancy, however, is suspicious when the newly widowed Eve exhibits little grief and no surprise at her husband's death, and more suspicious when Stripling's daughter (Eve's step-daughter), Caitlin, confronts Yancy at Stripling's funeral and angrily insists that Eve killed her husband for his money.

Seeking redemption with the police force, Yancy investigates further, and finds several indications of foul play: the mate from the fishing boat that found the arm is shot to death outside a bar, and his distraught girlfriend admits to Yancy that a woman matching Eve's description gave him the severed arm and paid him to fix it on the tourist's fishing line; investigating Stripling's medical supply company leads Yancy to a corrupt former surgeon who admits that Stripling was defrauding Medicare out of millions of dollars; and inside the Striplings' Florida vacation home, Yancy finds traces of blood and bone splinters in the garbage disposal. The picture seems clear: Eve killed her husband in the town house, then arranged for the arm to be found so he could be declared legally dead.

Unfortunately, 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 attacked in his backyard and nearly drowned by a masked man fitting the description of the mate's killer. He escapes by hiding beneath the roots of a mangrove tree.

Rosa 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 home one day to find his house 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 parted with his only companion, a badly-behaved capuchin monkey named Driggs, who now belongs to the Dragon Queen. Christopher appears to be the mysterious boyfriend of Eve Stripling, whom Yancy has tracked via his seaplane registry.

Rosa volunteers to visit the Grunions alone, posing as a wealthy American interested in buying one of the future resort homes (she has to go alone because Eve would recognize Yancy immediately). But as soon as Rosa enters the house, she is taken prisoner by Eve and Mr. Grunion.

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 shirt sleeves that had been neatly cut off. Suddenly understanding, Yancy rushes to the Grunion house, but is held at gunpoint by Christopher Grunion - in reality, Nicholas Stripling, alive and whole (minus his left arm).

Like many Medicare fraudsters facing indictment, Nick Stripling 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. So he amputated his own arm and had his wife plant it in Florida. Now legally dead, Stripling believes he is safe from the law, though the advance sales on the resort he is building with his ill-gotten gains are going much more slowly than he hoped.

The only hitches in his plan were his over-talkative accomplices, the mate and the surgeon (both of whom he killed), his greedy daughter Caitlin (whom Eve has successfully bribed), and Yancy, who Stripling is about to kill. Yancy is saved at the last moment by Neville, who sneaks up behind Stripling and stabs him in the spine with the broken shaft of a fishing rod. Fleeing the estate, Yancy and Neville run to the Dragon Queen's hut, where Stripling's hired thug took Rosa. They rescue her (thanks largely to Driggs, who attacks the naked thug with his teeth before reuniting with Neville) and hide in their hotel. With air and boat traffic grounded by a tropical storm, neither they nor the Striplings can leave the island that night, but the next morning Yancy threatens Stripling's own pilot into taking him and Rosa back to Miami.

Yancy immediately shares what he knows with the F.B.I., but the traditionally sluggish federal bureaucracy does not leave him hopeful that Nick and Eve will be arrested before they manage to escape again.

However, back on Andros, Nick, rendered almost paraplegic by the injury to his spine, has relentlessly berated his wife for the failure of his "perfect" plan. Pushed to the limit (and conscious of her own culpability in his many crimes), Eve murders Nick and dumps his body at sea at night, to be devoured by sharks. Believing herself safe at last, she attempts to speed away from the scene in a fishing boat and is killed when the boat crashes on a nearby reef. Ironically, the only part of Nick recovered from the sea is his remaining arm.

Returning to his 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, now an indolent 30-year-old dimwit. It took only a few days for Bonnie to grow tired of him, and pine for Yancy again. Having heard from Mr. Shook, the owner of the eyesore spec home, that Yancy had an attractive new girlfriend, Bonnie decided to show her devotion to Yancy by burning down the spec home. The Florida authorities offer to extradite her to Oklahoma, where she is being offered an extremely lenient plea deal for her jumping bail, but she insists on staying in Florida to fight the arson charges and, one day, reunite with Yancy, her true love. 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. One evening at his house, admiring the newly cleared view, they see Key deer, who used to graze around Yancy's house before the spec home was built, returning. Yancy takes a picture to send to Neville, who has reclaimed his home on Andros since the Striplings' resort project collapsed.

Characters

• Andrew Yancy: The protagonist, a former Miami-Dade Police detective, currently on suspension from the Monroe County Sheriff's office.
• Dr. Rosa Campesino: The Assistant 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).
• 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 a neighboring resort development.
• "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 middle-aged girlfriend.
• John Wesley Wiedermann: an agent of the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation, sent to Florida to recapture Plover/Bonnie.
• Cody Parrish: 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.
• Lombardo: Yancy's immediate superior as a health inspector.
• Brennan: owner of Stoney's Crab Palace, the Keys' most popular restaurant, where Yancy 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 supposedly worked as one of the monkeys on the Pirates of the Caribbean (film series)

Allusions to actual history, science, and current events

• In his foreword, Hiaasen writes that his portrayal of Yancy's horrific experiences as a restaurant health inspector are very close to the truth, based on Hiaasen's researches;
• Hiaasen also states that the method by which Stripling's arm was "discovered" on the end of a tourist's fish line is a variation on a common scam in South Florida, in which a previously-caught fish is hooked on an unsuspecting tourist's line to fool him into thinking he caught it;
• Driggs has been passed between several owners because of his incorrigible behavior, but one of the main selling points his owners use is that he was (briefly) one of the several capuchins who played the monkey character in Johnny Depp's first Pirates of the Caribbean film.
• Driggs was born into a "show business clan," other members of his family having appeared on the sitcom Friends and in the film Ace Ventura: Pet Detective.
• Several news stories have referred to South Florida as the Medicare fraud capital of America, a fact that Hiaasen remarks on several times in the novel.
• While discussing the extreme lengths that Stripling went to in order to fake his own death, Yancy and Rosa mention Anna Ayala's fraudulent lawsuit against the Wendy's fast-food chain, in which she planted a human finger (later identified as belonging to an associate of her husband) in the restaurant's chili. As a coroner, Rosa says there is no shortage of fraudsters willing to mutilate themselves or family members in order to work such a scam, but admits that Stripling was unusually audacious to part with a whole arm.
• In his journal, Cody writes, "like the book says, you can't go homeward angel" (Chapter Twenty-Six, page 268), confusing the titles of Thomas Wolfe's novels You Can't Go Home Again and Look Homeward, Angel.

Connections with Hiaasen's other works

• The Monroe County Sheriff worries that a news story about the severed arm in the ocean might discourage the tourist boating trade; Yancy retorts that "[a] sea of reeking turds wouldn't keep those lunatics off the water." Hiaasen wrote a column for the Miami Herald, collected in the anthology Kick Ass, about tourists avidly wading into a stretch of ocean polluted by fecal sewage, despite clearly posted warning signs.
• During their discussion, Yancy reminds the Sheriff that the Gulf Stream flows to the north, making the Sheriff's hopeful theory that the severed arm floated south from Miami extremely unlikely. In Hiaasen's previous novel Skinny Dip, the villain, a bogus marine biologist, throws his wife overboard at sea, mistakenly believing that the Gulf Stream flows to the south and will carry her body away from Florida.
• Andrew Yancy would return as the protagonist in Hiaasen's next novel for adults, Razor Girl.