At the start of Carl Hiaasenâs latest comedic marvel, a visitor fishing near Key West hooks a severed human arm. There is no time for this to register as grisly. A page later the captain of the fishing boat tells the freaked-out tourist reassuringly, âWell, son, weâre in the memory-making business.â You canât argue with that.  Mr. Hiaasen is in the memory-making business himself. But he hasnât written a novel this funny since âSkinny Dipâ in 2004, with which his new one, âBad Monkey,â shares some common ground. Both books begin with signs of lethal violence. (In âSkinny Dip,â a man throws his wife off a cruise ship.) Both involve scabby, furry creatures. And both touch lightly on Mr. Hiaasenâs serious concern with toxic pollution. The main character in âBad Monkeyâ is Andrew Yancy, a defrocked cop who is forced to turn restaurant inspector and learn more about bugs and toxins than he ever wished to know.  âTry the chowder,â Yancy is urged at one eatery.  âNot until they find a vaccine,â he replies.  Yancy winds up embroiled in the severed-arm investigation after his boss, the sheriff, âwho won office because he was the only candidate not in federal custody,â wants the limb transported from the Keys to Miami-Dade. Love blooms at the Miami morgue after Yancy meets Dr. Rosa Campesino, a beautiful coroner who coaxes him into hot sex on a cold slab. This helps Yancy get over his ex, Bonnie, a Texas teacher who seduced an underage student, Cody, who may just publish his diary about her.  âI should never have turned him on to Philip Roth,â Bonnie rues, but sheâs safe from literary embarrassment. When Bonnie last asked him what he liked to read, Cody wrote in the diary, âI told her Iâve sort of gotten away from books and more into Xbox.â  All that, and weâre not even up to the monkey. If Mr. Hiaasen has one failing, itâs the habit of delivering an oversupply of plot threads, too much of too many good things. But whoâs going to mind an ancillary story line about Yancyâs efforts to keep a developer from selling the tall, new, half-built house that blocks his ocean view? Yancyâs stunts to scare off buyers include installing a beehive in the house (âlater, after the Spillwrights had been stabilized at the emergency room ...â) and creating a nonsensically scary Santeria shrine made up of some of the Occultâs Greatest Hits. A pentagram and a bowl of cat blood may have nothing to do with the warrior god ChangÃ³, but thatâs not the point.  âYancy believed that maintaining cultural authenticity was less important than creating a vivid first impression for potential home buyers,â Mr. Hiaasen writes.  The calm, quasi-reasonable tone of that line is what sustains Mr. Hiaasenâs wall-to-wall hilarity. When Rosa tells Yancy about one of her post-mortems, on a man with a clarinet wedged up his colon â though he was killed by an oboist who shot him in the head â Yancyâs rejoinder is a model of understatement: âShakespeare was born too soon.â On the restaurant inspection job, when a woman is grievously injured by her dinner, Yancy explains: âShe got a fishhook stuck in her uvula. Iâm betting she ordered the Cuban yellowtail.â  Notice the perfection of those lines and their one-two delivery. (Why is Cuban yellowtail funnier than plain yellowtail? It just is.) Mr. Hiassen is such an assured humorist that he can underplay the best of his constructions, like âgrave robbery gone bad.â (When does a grave robbery go right?) However, he does pull out all the stops when it comes to Driggs, the bad monkey of the title and obviously a creature after the authorâs heart. Driggs is supposedly a former star of the Johnny Depp pirate movies who got himself fired by mistaking an array of brown wigs for a monkey mate. He is also supposed to have been the official Rally Monkey of the Los Angeles Angels until âa scrotum-grooming reverie, broadcast live on the stadium Jumbotronâ ended that phase of his career.  Driggs washes up in the Bahamas, where half of âBad Monkeyâ is set. And perhaps Mr. Hiaasen didnât need two evil real estate developers, one in the Keys and one in the Bahamas who has displaced a former landowner named Neville, in a single story. Maybe Neville didnât even need three girlfriends, though he likes having them. And maybe Mr. Hiaasen didnât need to affect Bahamian dialogue for the drunken voodoo queen who takes a shine to Driggs, calls him âdot pink boyâ and eyes him woozily but lasciviously. Driggs is pink and hairless because, after losing his access to movie-star cuisine, he fell unhealthily in love with Bahamian conch fritters.  The reason for all this screwball chaos in âBad Monkeyâ is clear: Mr. Hiassen does not write serious novels about the human condition. He does not make it matter whose arm was severed, who committed the storyâs several murders, which love affairs are real, or what will become of Yancyâs career. His books are built of balsa wood, but they are beautifully constructed all the same. And if they call for more comic distraction than honest emotion? Forget it, Jake; itâs South Florida. The truth is always stranger than fiction.  Mr. Hiaasenâs stories are sometimes partly based on real Miami news items. No word on whether Driggs is based on any real individual, living or dead.
A washed-up monkey, sex in a morgue, a severed arm at the end of a fishhook and other Carl Hiaasen capers make âBad Monkeyâ his funniest novel in almost a decade.