Bad Monkey (novel)

Plot Summary

In mid-July, a sportfisherman off the Florida Keys reels in a severed human arm. The Monroe County Sheriff, who is hyper-sensitive to any publicity threat to the Keys' tourist trade, details one of his detectives, Andrew Yancy, to transport the arm to Miami immediately and ensure that any investigation is handled by the Dade County authorities. In Miami, Yancy meets the attractive Dr. Rosa Campesino, the Assistant Dade County coroner. As he predicted, she tells him there is not enough evidence to connect the severed arm with any unsolved crimes in Dade County. Yancy's colleague advises him to drop the arm on the roadside on his way home, but Yancy rebelliously decides to keep it preserved in his home's freezer.

Yancy is currently on suspension, having assaulted the husband of his lover, Bonnie Witt, and is forced to work as a Health Inspector for the department of Hotels and Restaurants. During their last night together, before she and her husband move to Sarasota, Bonnie confesses that her real name is Plover Chase, and she is a fugitive from Oklahoma, a former high school teacher indicted for extorting sex from one of her underage students.

A woman, Eve Stripling, returns from a vacation in Europe and reports her husband, Nicholas, missing. A DNA test quickly matches the severed arm with Nicholas, who Eve says likely died in a boating accident. Yancy, however, is suspicious at Eve's lack of grief, and more suspicious when Stripling's daughter (Eve's step-daughter), Caitlin, angrily insists that Eve killed her husband for his money.

Seeking redemption with the police force, Yancy investigates further, and finds several indications of foul play: the mate from the fishing boat that found the arm is shot to death outside a bar, and his distraught girlfriend admits to Yancy that a woman matching Eve's description gave him the severed arm and paid him to fix it on the tourist's fishing line; investigating Stripling's medical supply company leads Yancy to a corrupt former surgeon who admits that Stripling was defrauding Medicare out of millions of dollars; and inside the Striplings' Florida vacation home, Yancy finds traces of blood and bone splinters in the garbage disposal. The picture seems clear: Eve killed her husband in the town house, then arranged for the arm to be found so he could be declared legally dead.

Unfortunately, Yancy's boss, the Sheriff, has no interest in pursuing the case any further, and Caitlin is delighted to abandon her suspicions as soon as Eve offers her half of Nick's life insurance. Both of them tell Yancy to abandon his investigation, but he refuses. A short time later, he is attacked in his backyard and nearly drowned by a masked man fitting the description of the mate's killer.

Rosa has been assisting Yancy with his investigation, and the two of them grow closer and eventually develop a sexual relationship. She agrees to accompany him on an undercover trip to the island of Andros, where Eve and a mysterious male companion are developing a vacation resort.

On Andros, Yancy finds an unexpected ally in Neville Stafford, a Bahamian fisherman whose property was sold against his wishes to the new resort development, after which he returned home one day to find his house demolished. Neville was so desperate to stop the development that he asked a local witch, the "Dragon Queen," to put a voodoo curse on the developer, Christopher Grunion. Neville even parted with his only companion, a badly-behaved capuchin monkey named Driggs, who now belongs to the Dragon Queen. Christopher appears to be the mysterious boyfriend of Eve Stripling, whom Yancy has tracked via his seaplane registry.

Rosa volunteers to visit the Grunions alone, posing as a wealthy American interested in buying one of the future resort homes. While waiting, Yancy converses with Neville, who mentions that he stole some personal items from Grunion's garbage to give to the Dragon Queen, including shirt sleeves that had been neatly cut off. Suddenly understanding, Yancy rushes to the Grunion house, but is held at gunpoint by Christopher Grunion - in reality, Nicholas Stripling, alive and whole (minus his left arm).

Like many Medicare fraudsters facing indictment, Nick Stripling decided he had to fake his own death to escape prosecution; unlike others, he decided to "foolproof" the deception by leaving behind actual human remains, instead of simply disappearing. So he amputated his own arm and had his wife plant it in Florida, before declaring him legally dead. Before he can shoot Yancy, he is ambushed by Neville, who stabs him in the spine with the broken shaft of a fishing rod. Fleeing the estate, Yancy and Neville run to the Dragon Queen's hut, where Stripling's hired thug took Rosa. They rescue her and Driggs, and Yancy threatens Stripling's own pilot into flying him and Rosa back to Miami.

Nick, rendered almost paraplegic by the injury to his spine, lays all the blame on Eve, who retaliates by murdering him and dumping his body at sea at night, to be devoured by sharks. Attempting to speed away from the scene, Eve herself is killed when her boat crashes on a nearby reef.

Returning home, Yancy's life is complicated by the reappearance of Bonnie Witt/Plover Chase, who left her husband and traveled back to Oklahoma to "re-connect" with her teenage lover, Cody, now an indolent 30-year-old dimwit. It took only a few days for Bonnie to grow tired of him, and pine for Yancy again. Having heard that Yancy already found another girlfriend, she decided to show her devotion to Yancy by burning down an over-sized spec home next to Yancy's that was ruining his view of the sunset. The Florida authorities offer to extradite her to Oklahoma, but she insists on staying in Florida to fight the arson charges. Yancy is secretly delighted that the spec home is gone, but he has no further interest in Bonnie. The OSBI agent sent to arrest Bonnie predicts that, before long, she will realize this and accept the extradition deal.

The Monroe County Sheriff reluctantly gives Yancy credit for solving the severed arm case, but tells him that, because of the publicity surrounding Bonnie, it will be at least another year, or two, before it will be safe to reinstate Yancy as a detective. Yancy is disappointed, but happy to be in a steady relationship with Rosa. Back on Andros, Neville reclaims his home after the Striplings' resort project collapses.

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