Book reviews from seattlemystery

Bad Monkey

by Carl Hiaasen

“No more than fifty hardy souls showed up for the funeral in a baking summer heat that undulated off the bright green grass.” It’s a beautiful sentence but that the funeral is being held to bury an arm – yes, an arm, bearing the tan lines of the owner’s treasured, expensive square wrist watch – will tell you that you are once again giggling in the maniac world of Carl Hiaasen. Bad Monkey is a lurid and complex tale of Medicaid and insurance fraud, murder, arson, rapacious developers, voodoo, and love, and the noisy, pipe-smoking, ex-movie star and overweight Driggs, who, by all evidence, is a very disagreeable monkey. Bad? – certainly unpleasant. “He’d won the animal in a game of dominoes with a sponger from Fresh Creek. The sponger told him he was the same monkey from the Johnny Depp pirate movies, which were filmed nearby in the Exumas. Neville named his new pet Driggs and he fed him too much deep-fried food. Before long the monkey got wringled and tufts of fur began falling out. He defiantly refused housebreaking so Nevil makde him wear disposable baby diapers with holes cut out for his tail. No the nearly hairless creature was hugging Neville’s left leg and chittering in dread of the voodoo woman.” The Dragon Lady is positive the largely hairless Driggs is actually a human child. The hero of the story is Yancy, bounced first from the Miami homicide unit for defending his lover from her abusive husband by, well, assaulting him with a car vacumm, and then demoted from the Key West cops to being a restaurant inspector (the job is so ghoulish that he immediately loses a fifth of his body weight ‘cause he’s too disturbed to eat). Yancy begins following the trail of fraud and murder and hopes by solving the case he can get back on the police force and leave the roach patrol behind. That’s about all I can tell you without ruining the fun of reading it for yourself or violating the PG rating we try to maintain for the newzine. Bad Monkey is Hiaasen in fine form, poking the usual suspects with a very sharp stick. Social satire is his point but a crime novel is his vehicle and he drives it at full speed, as fast as the winds of Hurricain Françoise (the Miami weathermen come in for special scorn) that rake the Bahamas where half the story takes place. “Here on Lizard Cay the grip of deep summer was unbreakable; the conch shack’s ceiling fan had only one blade. In the absence of casino income the puny island’s infrastructure doddered; two-thirds of the power poles knocked down by the funnicaine still lay where they’d fallen. Even when the electricity worked, the trailer on the construction site was a toaster oven, the prehistoric wall unit blowing warm dog-fart air.” Carl will be here to sign this new book on Tuesday June 25th at 1pm (a little later than usual due to his flight schedule). Bad Monkey has all of the touches of mordant wit, bruising commentary, and finely-honed phrases. The only thing it lacks is a certain ex-governor but, hell, you can’t have everything! If you’ve never read Hiaasen this is a great place to start. Like all of his books it is unconnected to any of the earlier ones and his savage and demented humor has not diminished since 2010’s Star Island, his last book for grown-ups. [Here’s an exerpt posted on-line by the Miami Herald. It’s the beginning of the book – the arm’s appearance.] Besides, he’s a nice guy. Come in and meet him and get yourself a book and one for your Dad as a late Father’s Day present. He’ll thank you!

Cover Of Snow

by Jenny Milchman

Small towns have secrets. That’s no surprise to anyone who’s ever lived in one, but the depth of those secrets is what Nora Hamilton has to explore in Jenny Milchman’s debut, Cover of Snow (no signed copies that we’re aware of, but if that changes, obviously we’ll let you know). Nora’s husband, Brendan, is a police officer in their small town of Wedeskyull, NY. And one snowy January morning, Nora wakes up to an awful silence; her husband has hanged himself. She is beyond stunned, and as she tries to make sense of what has happened, Nora discovers that things in Wedeskyull are not as peaceful as she has always believed, and that the secrets the town hides go back farther than she could have ever imagined. Cover of Snow might very well have slid beneath my radar except that Jenny and her husband stopped by to discuss it this past summer (the personal touch matters!), and had I missed it, that would have been a shame. This is an excellent book! Milchman captures the biting winter cold, the sense of isolation that Nora feels as an outsider and her growing fear as she realizes she doesn’t know who she can trust. Having lived in a small town, I understood the fine line that residents can walk beween feeling wrapped in the comfort of knowing everyone and how quickly that comfort can turn into a feeing of being trapped. While the first chapter seemed a bit choppy to me, the story was so compelling that I couldn’t stop reading it, and Jenny Milchman’s style smoothed out and took off. She has created memorable and astonishing characters, and I feel like I really know these people. Her ability to use the weather and the town almost as characters on their own is excellent. I love finding debut authors, and Jenny Milchman is one to take note of!