Razor Girl - Carl Hiaasen

It's been a while - five years, unbelievably - since I last read a Hiassen. That was Bad Monkey. This is Razor Girl. The hero is the same, Andrew Yancy, busted ex-cop turned roach inspector, but other than that, all is new.


The razor girl is Merry Mansfield, who specialises in tail-ending other vehicles while she's purportedly shaving her pubic hair. She and Yancy team up to solve the case of the missing reality TV redneck, Buck Nance, who has gone AWOL after an ill-judged homophobic/racist rant in the wrong bar in the wrong part of Florida.


Along the way we and they encounter Mafioso 'Big Noogie' Aeola, replacement beach specialist Marty Trebeaux, class action lawyer Brock Richardson and his fiancée Deb, Buck's biggest fan 'Blister' Krill and a pair of giant Gambian pouch rats. So it's all business as usual, brilliantly plotted and laugh-out loud funny. Pure Hiaassen on top form.

Bad Monkey - Carl Hiaasen

The brand new caper from the king of comedy crime.  Recent Hiaasen's might have fallen slightly short but not this. Busted from detective to roach inspector after having sodomised his girlfriend's husband with a dustbuster, Yancey sets out to solve the mystery of the left arm which turns up where it shouldn't be.  What can go wrong?

One of Hiaasen's recent shortcomings has been recycling old characters.  The governor gone renegade was great fun but surfaced once too often for my liking.  These, so far as I am aware, are all new characters, thus fresh and engaging.  You even empathise with a low-rent thug like Egg after the titular monkey has set about him.

In fact, that's my one criticism.  Not enough monkey and not enough monkey being really, really bad.