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Bad Monkey Kindle Edition
A wickedly funny novel from the New York Times bestselling author of Squeeze Me 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.
“[A] comedic marvel … [Hiaasen] hasn’t written a novel this funny since Skinny Dip.”—The New York Times
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.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherVintage Crime/Black Lizard
- Publication dateJune 11, 2013
- File size4125 KB
Her features were a riot of futile surgeries, and she laughed like a mandrill on PCP.Highlighted by 287 Kindle readers
The new sheriff of Monroe County was a local bubba named Sonny SummersHighlighted by 219 Kindle readers
He wondered if something was mentally wrong with him for being content with what he had …Highlighted by 202 Kindle readers
Editorial Reviews
From Booklist
Review
—Janet Maslin, The New York Times
“[A] deliciously zany romp. Buckle up for the ride.”
—People
“Bad Monkey boils over with corruption and comeuppance. And yes, there’s a monkey.”
—O, The Oprah Magazine
“[A] rollicking misadventure in the colorful annals of greed and corruption in South Florida.... Hiaasen has a peculiar genius for inventing grotesque creatures ... that spring from the darkest impulses of the id. But he also writes great heroes.”
—Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times
“This ‘Triple-F’—fierce, funny, and Floridian ... enfolds corruption, greed, mayhem, and very funny social satire in the way that only Hiaasen does it.”
—Reader’s Digest
“[Hiaasen is] one of America’s premier humorists.”
—Rege Behe, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
“No one writes about Florida with a more wicked sense of humor than Hiaasen.”
—Jocelyn McClurg, USA Today
“The gold standard for South Florida criminal farce.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Inspired ... Another marvelously entertaining Hiaasen adventure.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Hiaasen is laugh-out-loud funny and thoroughly entertaining.”
—Booklist (starred review)
Praise for the work of Carl Hiaasen
“Carl Hiaasen isn’t just Florida’s sharpest satirist—he’s one of the few funny writers left in the whole country ... I think of him as a national treasure.”
—Malcolm Jones, Newsweek
“Does anyone remember what we did for fun before Hiaasen began turning out his satirical comedies?”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“Hiaasen [is] a superb national satirist ... A great American writer about the great American subjects of ambition, greed, vanity and disappointment.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“Hiaasen’s wasteland is as retributive as Cormac McCarthy’s, but funnier.... [His] pacing is impeccable, and the scenes follow one another like Lay’s potato chips.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“Hiaasen [is] king of the screwball comedies ... A truly original comic novelist ... The charismatic, animated characters deliver lines that will bring tears of laughter to even the most jaundiced readers ... This is top-notch storytelling by a truly original comic novelist.”
—Rocky Mountain News
“Carl Hiaasen is a lot like Evelyn Waugh.... Both simmer with rage; both are consumed with the same overwhelming vision ... [both] write the funniest English of this century.”
—The Washington Post
“Hiaasen [is] in the company of Preston Sturges, Woody Allen, and S. J. Perelman.”
—Janet Maslin, The New York Times
“A big-hearted and deeply funny book ... All of Carl Hiaasen’s obsessions are on full-tilt boogie.”
—The Seattle Times
“Hiaasen, like Elmore Leonard, shouldn’t be missed....Hiaasen throws his colorful characters into an increasingly frenetic mix, and the fun lies in watching how, or if, they’ll manage to extricate themselves.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“Whenever it seems as if he might be running out of oxen to gore, Hiaasen comes up with fresh victims for his killing wit. [He is] Florida’s most entertainingly indignant social critic . . . Outlandish events soar on the exuberance of Hiaasen’s manic style, a canny blend of lunatic farce and savage satire.”
—Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times Book Review
“A whole lot ‘Survivor,’ a little bit ‘The Tempest,’ with a pinch of Laurel and Hardy ... Hiaasen is always good for a number of laugh-aloud scenes and lines ... His ear is pitch-perfect.”
—Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“Hilarious ... A lifelong resident of the Sunshine State, [Hiaasen’s] novels have always addressed the state’s ecological and social ills with scathing satire, ironic comeuppance and an ever-evolving sensibility.”
—Time Out New York
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
On the hottest day of July, trolling in dead-calm waters near Key West, a tourist named James Mayberry reeled up a human arm. His wife flew to the bow of the boat and tossed her breakfast burritos.
“What’re you waiting for?” James Mayberry barked at the mate.“Get that thing off my line!”
The kid tugged and twisted, but the barb of the hook was imbedded in bone. Finally the captain came down from the bridge and used bent-nose pliers to free the decomposing limb, which he placed on shaved ice in a deck box.
James Mayberry said, “For Christ’s sake, now where are we supposed to put our fish?”
“We’ll figure that out when you actually catch one.”
It had been a tense outing aboard the Misty Momma IV. James Mayberry had blown three good strikes because he was unable to absorb instruction. Dragging baits in the ocean was different than jigging for walleyes in the lake back home.
“Don’t we need to call somebody?” he asked the captain.
“We do.”
The hairy left arm was bloated and sunburned to the hue of eggplant.
A cusp of yellowed humerus protruded at the point of separation, below the shoulder. The flesh surrounding the wound looked ragged and bloodless.
“Yo, check it out!” the mate said.
“What now?” James Mayberry asked.
“His freakin’ finger, dude.”
The victim’s hand was contracted into a first except for the middle digit, which was rigidly extended.
“How weird is that? He’s flippin’ us off,” the mate said.
The captain told him to re-bait the angler’s hook.
“Has this ever happened out here before?” James Mayberry said. “Tell the truth.”
“You should go see about your wife.”
“Jesus, I’ll never hear the end of it. Louisa wanted to ride the Conch Train today. She did not want to come fishing.”
“Well, son,” the captain said, “we’re in the memory-making business.”
He climbed back to the bridge, radioed the Coast Guard and gave the GPS coordinates of the gruesome find. He was asked to remain in the area and look for other pieces of the body.
“But I got a charter,” he said.
“You can stay at it,” the Coast Guard dispatcher advised. “Just keep your eyes open.”
After calming herself, Louisa Mayberry informed her husband that she wished to return to Key West right away.
“Come on, sugar. It’s a beautiful morning.” James Mayberry didn’t want to go back to the dock with no fish to hang on the spikes—not after shelling out a grand to hire the boat.
“The first day of our honeymoon, and this! Aren’t you sketched out?”
James Mayberry peeked under the lid of the fish box. “You watch CSI all the time. It’s the same type of deal.”
His wife grimaced but did not turn away. She remarked that the limb didn’t look real.
“Oh, it’s real,” said James Mayberry, somewhat defensively. “Just take a whiff.” Snagging a fake arm wouldn’t make for as good a story.
A real arm was pure gold, major high-fives from all his peeps back in Madison. You caught a what? No way, bro!
Louisa Mayberry’s gaze was fixed on the limb. “What could have happened?” she asked.
“Tiger shark,” her husband said matter-of-factly.
“Is that a wedding band on his hand? This is so sad.”
“Fish on!” the mate called. “Who’s up?”
James Mayberry steered his bride to the fighting chair and the mate fitted the rod into the gimbal. Although she was petite, Louisa Mayberry owned a strong upper body due to rigorous Bikram yoga classes that she took on Tuesday nights. Refusing assistance, she pumped in an eleven-pound blackfi n tuna and whooped triumphantly as it flopped on the deck. Her husband had never seen her so excited.
“Here, take a picture!” she cried to the mate, and handed over her iPhone.
“Hold on,” James Mayberry said. “Get both of us together.”
Louisa watched him hustle to get ready. “Really, Jimmy? Really?”
Moments later the captain glanced down from the bridge and saw the mate snapping photographs of the newlyweds posed side by side at the transom. Their matching neon blue Oakley wraparounds were propped on their matching cap visors, and their fair Wisconsin noses practically glowed with sunblock.
Louisa Mayberry was gamely hoisting by the tail her sleek silvery tuna while James Mayberry wore the mate’s crusty gloves to grip his rancid catch, its middle finger aimed upward toward the puffy white clouds.
The captain dragged on a cigarette and turned back to the wheel.
“Another fucking day in paradise,” he said.
Product details
- ASIN : B00AP2VR8W
- Publisher : Vintage Crime/Black Lizard (June 11, 2013)
- Publication date : June 11, 2013
- Language : English
- File size : 4125 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 337 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #91,240 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #80 in American Humorous Fiction
- #134 in Lawyers & Criminals Humor
- #279 in Satire Fiction
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Carl Hiaasen was born and raised in Florida, where he still lives. He is a prize-winning journalist with a regular column in the Miami Herald and many articles in varied magazines. He started writing crime fiction in the early 1980s and has recently branched out into children's books; he has also had several works of non-fiction published.
Customer reviews
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Top reviews
Top reviews from the United States
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Unfortunately Bad Monkey was a disappointment beginning with the Monkey himself who was just disgusting even by Hiaasen standards and added nothing to the story. I even disliked the picture and tossed the cover the day I bought the book. But it's a Hiaasen so it's a keeper and has his wonderfully outrageous humor, his amazingly good prose and the same satirical outrage with the evolution of his beloved Florida that makes all of his books so enjoyable.
But this one is too disjointed, the characters are less lovable and the hero less, well...heroic than his usual stuff. This is not his worst book, he really doesn't have a best or worst book but it is not quite as enjoyable as most. Try again Carl....soon.
Enter Andrew Yancy, suspended from the sheriff's office for assaulting a man with a vacuum cleaner and tasked with transporting the arm. "Yancy knew the sheriff was sending the arm to Miami [from the Keys] because Miami was the floating-human-body-parts capital of America."
Hiaasen's style drives the narrative as much as his ability to weave a weaving plot; examples are everywhere. Here's just one from early in the book: "During his sixteen years as a road patrol officer, Sonny Summers had received numerous commendations for not f***ing up on the job... One year he led the whole force in DUI arrests, a highly competitive category in the Keys."
As for the plot? I'm sure I'd botch it if I tried to summarize it, with all the characters, their various motivations and shenanigans.... so I'll just assure you if you've loved Hiaasen for his zany unpredictability, you'll appreciate this particular story, its unique characters, and general fun.
Read it if you're feeling lousy about the state of things. It will make you smile.
". . . a fun, fast read and a wild ride."
BAD MONKEY is vintage Hiaasen. A quirky protagonist, surrounded by even quirkier characters, mired in odd-ball intrigue, in South Florida, of course. This story revolves around Florida Keys detective Andrew Yancy, newly busted to the role of restaurant inspector, aka "roach patrol," for attacking one Dr. Clifford Witt, husband of a former Yancy lover, with a hand-held Black & Decker vacuum cleaner. All videoed by cruise liner tourists with cell phones in hand. Yancy embarks on several hit and miss attempts to get his badge back. No easy proposition. Particularly since his boss, Sheriff Sonny Summers, opinion is that Yancy was lucky they didn't "charge you with sodomy."
But the warm waters off the Florida Keys offer up salvation in the form of a severed arm, middle finger extended as if to say, well you know. Seems the arm belonged to a wealthy crook, who scammed various medical insurance companies for millions, only to die in a boating accident, leaving the arm behind to be hooked by a tourist on a fishing charter. But in Hiaasen's world things are never as they seem. Not even close.
The police want the missing arm case as well as a murder and a suicide (or not) to go quietly into the archives. But, Yancy doesn't buy it. He sees nefarious activity in the shadows. And he has a plan. Solve the murder, disprove the suicide, and prove that the wife offed the arm's previous owner. Or did she? Tie up all these loose ends and they'll have to return his badge. Won't they?
This story is totally Hiassen. It bounces around the Keys, South Florida, and the Bahamas. Reminiscent of his earlier works such as SKINNY DIP, STORMY WEATHER, and STRIP TEASE, BAD MONKEY is filled with easy one-liners, believably unbelievable occurrences, and odd ball characters: love interest Dr. Rosa Campesino, a medical examiner with a penchant for sex on the dissecting table; The Egg, a homicidal brute who has Yancy in his sites; the Dragon Queen, a Bahamian scooter-riding VooDoo witch who delights in kinky sex and casting black spells; and of course Driggs, the "bad monkey." Bad doesn't quite cover it. Maybe petulant, combative, or recalcitrant. No, vile. That's the word. What else could you say about a monkey who attacks without warning and tends toward flinging excrement on a whim? Yeah, vile works.
As if all this didn't fill Yancy's plate, his neighbor is constructing a massive mansion that will block Yancy's view of the water. Yancy's attempts to waylay those plans are numerous and insane (in a Hiassen sort of way).
Through solving murders, tracking down folks who have gone missing, messing with his neighbor's head, and avoiding The Egg and Driggs as best he can, Yancy attempts to develop a real relationship with the good Dr. Campesino.
You'll need a scorecard to keep up with all the characters, many having a couple of aliases, and all the scams within scams, but the pages will fly by. For Hiaasen fans (like me) this book will cause more than a few laugh-out -loud moments and for new fans, welcome to his world. It's a fun, fast read and a wild ride.
DP Lyle, award-winning author of the Dub Walker and Samantha Cody thriller series
Top reviews from other countries
As usual the story takes place in the beautiful Florida Keys, where in this case ex detective Andrew lives earning a living inspecting food joints and enjoying his surroundings. That is until the man next door builds a large holiday home blocking his former lovely view. Much hilarity ensues as potential buyer after buyer frightened away by Andrew in a bid to eliminate this unsightly edifice.
The main plot involves a widow who has supposedly lost her husband due to an accident at sea and all she has left is his arm. This intrigues Andrew and as he becomes more involves in the case the titular bad monkey makes his hilarious and very naughty appearance .
The main crux of the novel is what is going on with the mysterious widow and her strange and conflicting behaviour and as usual the main protagonist gets to the bottom of it with unexpected help and crazy consequences.
I loved this and will read every book written by this author. It is so nice to take another ride into a such a well thought out crime caper. Just so much fun and so well meant.
But this book just has it all again. Crazy critters, human and animal, unexpected turns of events, each one funnier, crazier than the next. And just when you think it cannot get any crazier, it does.
The wonderful thing about good writing by Carl Hiaasen, is that he can make crazy seem, if not normal, at least acceptable. It makes you feel things could happen like that.
Bad Monkey, a great, crazy, funny, hilarious read :)

























