Florida is a weird place. If you’ve spent any real length of time there, you know exactly what I mean. If you’ve done the occasional Disney vacation or spring break fling, you might even have a slight inkling. All it really takes though is a look at something like Florida Man or Florida Woman on twitter. As someone whose ancestry runs through that curious clime, I feel fully qualified to make these statements. For the saner part of the world, however, I direct your attention to Carl Hiaasen. More than anyone else I’ve ever read, Hiaasen captures the abject weirdness of the sunshine state.

Hiaasen may be best known for his kids books, Hoot chief among them, but it turns out he has a whole slew of adult novels as well. This, his latest, takes the zany action which makes his young readers books so popular and ramps it up to adult levels. Whereas Chomp begins with a frozen iguana falling out of a tree, Bad Monkey begins like this: “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.”

And that right there tells you enough about this book. If you laughed, you’ll like it; if you didn’t, well, I’m sure Nicholas Sparks has something new coming out. What Hiaasen has done here is write a reasonable mystery filled with excellent dialogue and hilarious situational humor. His imagination, such as the vacuum-related violence which gets his main character fired from the Monroe County sheriff’s office, is born of the absurdity in which he lives. I mean, you might think it ridiculous that a former police officer in the Keys would keep the aforementioned severed arm in his kitchen freezer, but that would be because you don’t read a lot of Florida news.

Hiaasen manipulates those sorts of moments into well-timed jokes which keep the story both light and moving at speed. He touches on the tension between native islanders and rich transplants, with some environmental concerns mixed in (a staple for his books), but there is little real depth to the story. The characters are largely flat and unchanging, although Yancy shows a subtle maturing from beginning to end. Ultimately what you have here is entertainment. Absurd and mildly vulgar, yes, but pretty darn entertaining all the same. Which really kind of sums up Florida too. ( )

I don't generally rate thrillers--or other genre novels--with five stars as a matter of literary and critical principle. In the case of this hilarious high comedy, I am delighted to make an exception.

Setting: Florida
I found the monkey creepy and distracting from the overall story, but otherwise this was a fun murder mystery with some funny bits and a fairly interesting cast of characters, all of them a bit caricatured, but good enough for light entertainment. ( )

This was kind of funny. Not laugh out loud (LOL!) funny. More like occasional amused smirk (lol) funny. The mystery was engaging, if a bit drawn out by the side adventures and extraneous activity. The characters were well drawn, if a bit over-the-top and all-over-the-map. This ain't Elmore Leonard, but who is? ( )

Yancy is a police detective demoted to restaurant food inspector while the media circus around his "incident" with married girlfriend that caused his removal dies down. On the down low he is asked to deliver a limb found at the beach & transfer it to another county to avoid tourists leaving. A mystery ensues about who's arm is it, a few murders, travel to the islands, a monstrosity house being built next door to Yancy, & way too many characters and side stories to make this book smooth. I had to go back a page to see if I missed something as the story skipped around. It did eventually tie up some loose ends toward the end but was unsatisfying. I liked the Yancy character and his new girlfriend but half of the other characters could've been eliminated. I also had a hard time trying to figure out the "island" talk & it was irritating to decipher (no mon, why I do sum ting like dot. bey, I gon pudda black coyse on your soul black as det) The book had a lot of funny spots in it and it was clean with no descriptive sex scenes and not a lot of foul language so I upped it a star ( )