He just sat there sipping rum and watching the deer do their thing.Carl Hiaasen lives in Florida, and as a Florida native his books not only touch on what life is like in Florida, but they also speak about common problems that Florida is facing, most of them focused on environmental issues and the increased levels of development in Florida that is impacting the local wildlife.įor his adult books, themes of greed, capitalism, and shortsightedness are prevalent, while in his children’s books, those themes are also there… along with the themes of growing up and fighting for what you believe in. … Only a few hundred of the deer remained, roaming a handful of islands … but the animals were hapless when it came to avoiding cars, especially at night.” Yancy used to watch the deer when they appeared, but he didn’t “snap pictures, or whistle, or make up cute names for the fawns. Hiaasen’s love for the Florida being lost to development, overcrowding and McMansions is impossible to miss, such as when Yancy ruminates on the small herd of white-tailed Key deer that used to frequent the neighboring lot now being defiled with an oversized spec house: “They were fantastically small and delicate-looking. Premeditated robbery-homicides are rare because they require a level of planning and sober enterprise seldom encountered among the island’s indolent felons.”īut there’s more to “Bad Monkey” than oddball characters and zippy lines. (The fact that the Monroe County sheriff would rather not admit any crime occurred is just one more problem to overcome.) So Yancy sets off to the Miami medical examiner - Miami being “the floating-human-body-parts capital of America,” after all - to see if a body has surfaced to match the arm.Īs he did with national bestsellers “Strip Tease” and “Tourist Season,” Hiaasen aims his jaded eye and barbed tongue at the hapless idiots who seem to have overtaken his beloved state: “The typical Key West murder is a drunken altercation over debts, dope or dance partners. Yancy, whose new job has left him with no appetite and a distinctly cadaverous appearance, is desperate to return to police work, and thinks solving the mystery will do the trick. Knopf, 317 pages, $26.95) follows Andrew Yancy - a police detective busted down to restaurant inspector - who has a hunch that there’s more to the story of the dismembered arm than a solo fishing trip gone awry. “On the hottest day of July, trolling in dead-calm waters near Key West, a tourist named James Mayberry reeled up a human arm.” And with that line, we are off on another reliably strange mystery by author and Florida native son Carl Hiaasen.
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