A Book A Week - Week 35: Bad Monkey

This week's book:
  Bad Monkey  by Carl Hiassen

Grade:  B

Maybe I'm not that into cop procedurals or detective  stories.  Maybe it's just Florida...

The author is a very good writer, as he should be, since he also writes as a journalist for the Miami Herald.  No dangling participles here, no fragments, no changes in voice or point of view mid-scene.  It's clean and spare, sometimes to the point of being abrupt.  Well-executed.
   The tone, however... eh, not so much.

I did not like the tone.  Not one bit.  Since the action is set in the Florida Keys, mostly, maybe this is the tone it should have.  I don't know, I've never been to the Keys.  I do know, though, that I don't like books where the dialogue comes fast and snappy, and the banter is really just the author being clever with himself.  This is what we have here.  I've referenced The Gilmore Girls before, which I also never got into, and this is more of the same.  Everyone's clever, everyone's got a snappy comeback, everyone's too cool for school.  Real people aren't like this, real people have real conversations that don't always dive for the punch line.  Matter of fact, if you know someone who always has to be clever, who always tries to speak the way the characters in Bad Monkey speak, you probably try to avoid them at all costs.  Narcissists are tedious to be around.

As far as the story goes, it's not a bad premise.  A disgraced detective - I presume the disgrace happens in a prior novel but I'm not certain - is allowed to stay employed by becoming a health department inspector.  It's a gross job, as anyone the restaurant biz can tell you, and he hates it but it keeps him in rent money.  Because of this connection and his desperate need to get back on the police force, he's drawn into a mystery when a severed human arm is snagged by a tourist fishing for sailfish.  The plot proceeds from there, moving from the Keys to Miami to the Bahamas.
   I think it's a very imaginative and suitably convoluted beginning.  I'm not a regular mystery reader, but I'm pretty sure they don't all start out with a severed arm being dragged out of the Gulf by a tourist who wants to pose with it as if he snagged the Great White from Jaws.

The plot is very twisty and turn-y, as a mystery should be, lots of ins and outs, lots of what-have-yous.  I had it figured out by page 100 or so.  By that I mean I suspected the major twist - again not a Dan-Brown-style lie but a for-real twist -  by page 100. I wasn't proved right until 200 or so pages later.  I don't hold this against the author, I've learned this year that I'm something of a mystery spoil-sport.  No harm, no foul.  With the details, such as a dead man whose business was running a Medicare scam with mobility wheelchairs, Bahamians looking for voodoo curses, and desperate real-estate developers, the plot was also very Floridian.  Which isn't really for me.
  At times the secondary characters kind of blended for me, I wasn't quite sure who was who every so often.  But the major characters all distinguished themselves, even if their dialogue devolved into the same brand of patter more than I liked.

There was, in fact, a monkey in this story.  He did turn out to be a major character, though he was the only one who wasn't constantly trying to one-up the others with a punch line.  He was not, in fact, a bad monkey at all.

If you like mystery novels, this is good one, you should read it.  If you hated the Gimore Girls, like I did, you'll probably not like this either. 

Next week:
 The Last Buccaneer   by Lynn Erickson
 A Harlequin Romance.  I'm not lying.  I got it at Half-Price books by way of Goodwill.  I paid a buck and I probably got ripped off.  This is so far out of my genre comfort zone that I'm actually giddy and sick with anticipation at the same time.
   Here's the proof that I actually have this book in my possession, and that the provenance is true.  The Goodwill sticker is the upside-down one under Eyepatch's chiseled chin.