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.
Here is Hiaasen doing what he does better than anyone else: spinning a tale at once fiercely pointed
and wickedly funny 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 in mordantly ingenious, diabolically
