I was on the train in New York City. It was the middle of the night, my nose buried in Bad Monkey by Carl Hiaasen. Some guy approached me and said “I’m sorry to bother you, I know this is weird, but I just had to tell you I read this book last week and it gets even crazier.”
I was about 100 pages in. Boy, was that stranger right. Over the years Yancy had conjured many irrational revenge fantasies about Johnny Mendez. For a time he considered seducing Mendez’s wife until he realized he’d be doing Mendez a huge favor. Mrs. Mendez was an unbearable harridan. Her features were a riot of futile surgeries, and she laughed like a mandrill on PCP. Yancy once bought her a margarita at the InterContinental, and for two solid weeks he’d slept with the lights on.”
- These and other such hilarious lines populate Bad Monkey, a Florida Keys murder-mystery.
Carl Hiassen is one of a of a LARGE group of crime writers based in South Florida. Even the subset that he’s part of is pretty big: crime writers based in South Florida who write about South Florida crime. Most of these novelists either put out cozy murder mysteries or police thrillers (the thick ones, good for captivation on long flights and layovers.) Hiaasen is part of the smaller subset that falls somewhere in the middle. He’s landed in the right place. Bad Monkey kicks off the Yancy series, two books long as of 2018. Old Andrew Yancy is a suspended Florida Keys detective, reassigned as a health department inspector. He yearns to get his old job back for a few reasons, mainly: he’s used to being a cop, he’s a good detective (albeit unruly,) and inspecting dives in the Florida Keys is more gruesome than being a policeman. Losing his appetite more and more with each restaurant he inspects, he fortunately gets rapped up in solving a new murder. His initial lead is a severed arm that he drives to the coroner as a favor, but his instincts and his wish to be reinstated to the Sheriffs office motivate him to pursue the issue. He uses his very gray and arguable police credentials, along with plain-good snooping and networking, to get to the bottom of the crime. I partly grew up in South Florida. I wasn’t in the Keys specifically but a lot of passages in Bad Monkey had me beaming with nostalgia and sympathy for the shady place for shady people that is SFL. No, it’s not a comprehensive picture of the region but the world of ’s book sure seemed familiar. Those who are unfamiliar will be properly educated and delight in Yancy’s witty narration. As one might predict, real estate development is prominent in Bad Monkey. There are a lot of great passages about the frazzled realtor Evan Shook, who has the misfortune of trying to sell a luxury home that is next to Yancy’s dilapidated bungalow (Yancy’s not too great of a selling point either.) Another of Shook’s significant woes is having to cuddle-up to the snobby prospective buyers who will probably end up passing on the estate next to the wayward cop: Ken Turble, who preferred to be called Kenny, had made such a killing in the commodities markets that he remained revoltingly wealthy after losing two-thirds of his fortune in a divorce. His new wife, Tanya, was eleven years younger than the youngest Turble offspring. Kenny proudly shared this information with Evan Shook early in the car ride. As a way of backfilling, Tanya yipped, ‘I got a business degree from Kaplan.’.....
Shook has one weak lead after the next - weaker and weaker as bad-neighbor Detective Yancy throws himself deeper into a murder case. We chuckle at his predicament and also pity it. The real estate retirement dream is rife with much failure and a few small victories.
Before long, Evan Shook had set aside his native wariness in order to nurture Ford Lipscomb’s fantasy, which was the boilerplate back-nine fantasy of so many ultra-successful, ultra-resourceful American males: to live by the sea in perpetual sunshine, in a state with no income tax.”
Shook just is unable to sell the dream when it’s next to an eyesore of a property and an eyesore of a man. Yancy’s impediment of the sale next door is intentional, but he only has so much time to pursue it; there’s a murderer on the lose and finding him is Yancy’s way back into the police fore (he thinks.)
He’s an older man who understands these islands below Miami. He understands the people, people in general. They’re like him, restless and carnal: It was possible that Eve Stripling was too careful to bring her lover to the house, but in Yancy’s experience lust usually triumphed over prudence.”
Yancy actually does develop a serious relationship – with the coroner who examines the severed arm. Her name is Dr. Campesino. Their relationship makes fodder for good personal drama, but it doesn’t overwhelm the narrative.
Hiaasen masterfully carves kind of a miserable tale into one that reads like hi-jinks. Such is the way of the sunshine state. Long may it live. Yancy needed a moment to absorb the scene. 
One thing this job has taught me is that when people are caught in the maddening swirl of time, they do what they need to do and invent their reasoning afterward.”
It is simultaneously a good detective story, spy novel, political thriller, personal drama, and science fiction piece. Yes, it falls within each of these genres fittingly. The sci-fi element takes a unique position; it is central to the plot yet never fleshed out. As the story goes on, the time travel and Men-In-Black-like gadgets stay palatable even though not deeply explained. This is because the lack of technological explanation eventually, intentionally, becomes pivotal to the story and its main character, Zed, a time traveling agent from the future.
Zed is sent back to our present-day to maintain history as he knows it against time traveling criminals who wish to change it for their benefit. Zed’s being from the future brings distanced outsider appraisals of our world that are worth remembering. One thing this job has taught me is that when people are caught in the maddening swirl of time, they do what they need to do and invent their reasoning afterward.”
Everybody learns from the past but Zed’s occupation makes him a hard-boiled historian, aware by experience of humanity’s pitfalls from times before his own utopian era.
It made me wonder if that was how life worked in this beat, if everyone spied on everyone else, if parked cars were full of cops and feds and dicks, if on every Metro ride you were subject to the gazes of paid informants.”
No man is an island, obviously, and Zed’s utopian ideals are sometimes chipped at by the old era he visits. His atheism, for example, is challenged by the heightened emotion and spirituality of his 2000s love interest/assignment.
‘Seriously, though. Almost makes you wonder if someone was guiding us, strange as that sounds.’
The woman in that passage is Tasha, a bereaved 2000s Washingtonian. Her soldier-brother’s death is a punctuation of how changed post-9/11 America is. Though that factor makes her pain acute, she’s rightly aware that the world will never be the same now for anyone.
She wanted to blame the military for this new life of having her bag and purse checked everywhere she went–not just airports but Wizards games, the Smithsonian museums, her own office building–even though she knew the military was hardly to blame. This was America, and for once she didn’t want to be treated like some potential assassin, would appreciate a smile from a stranger, would like people to remember how it felt to live in a city made up of neighbors rather than spies and informers.”
I personally remember the time shortly after 9/11 as one when most people came together and cared for one another. The quote above accurately reflects what happened after the unity though; ashes of disillusionment settled over our resolve as war raged abroad and at home. From those ashes conspiracy theorists grew ever more prominent, trying to fill the voids of our uncertainty. Tasha sees this too:
Then a couple of ‘visiting economics professors’ (likely unemployed) gave a long, meandering lecture about ‘world capitalism’s master plan for the subjugated people of the Middle East.’ Tasha tried not to fall asleep as she sat there listening to old white men discuss how the free marketeers had deliberately seeded chaos in Baghdad, just like they did in New Orleans after Katrina and in South Asia after the tsunami; even supposedly random events like meteorological disasters were ascribed to a nefarious cabal’s master plan. If the making of legislation and sausage were two things you just did not want to witness, Tasha thought, the same seemed to be true of world peace. This was some seriously tedious shit.”
Gail, a present-day intelligence officer professes some unfortunate truths in a smart aleck way:
Jones’s wife was Persian–that’s how Iranian Americans describe themselves when they don’t want to freak people out.”
Also noted in his story line is the obsolescence many skilled workers increasingly battle in the face of technology, even skilled workers such as spies:
‘…. From what I understand, he was part cryptologist, part telecom wizard for whatever the hell it is they do there.’ People in Leo and Gail’s line of work tended to despise the techno-geeks at NSA, who were slowly co-opting the CIA’s money and influence with their monstrously powerful ability to overhear and oversee pretty much anything on earth.”
The Revisionists was published in 2011, Author Thomas Mullen keen to advancements that were growing mass surveillance and unmanned war.
Leo, the other operative in the above quote, has to be the book’s most optimistic or, erm, patriotic character. His view of things in the United States is relative to the worst parts of the rest of the world. His view is worth at least consideration, especially when we American’s get riled by the stereotypical first-world problems: What utopia were people like T.J. dreaming of when they rallied against the minor problems of capitalism and democracy? Had they taken a look at the world around them? Didn’t they realize how much better this was than any other country, any other system, any other way of life? Had they failed to notice that every time some mad dreamer took the reins of a country by revolution and promised his people a paradise on earth, he delivered the opposite? T.J. and his pals reminded Leo of the academics he’d grown so tired of; they’d been too busy lining up for Abuses of the American Empire 101 to bother learning about Stalin’s gulags. They’d been too busy mocking Oliver North and Reagan to read about the Sandinista death camps. They’d been too taken with the romance of the Black Panthers and the Weatherman’s heroic post office bombings to take heed of the warnings in Pol Pot’s exterminations or Mao’s purges. They had so much fun pointing out all that was wrong with the closest thing to perfection that any of them would ever see in their angst-ridden lives.”
Zed, our time-hopping secret agent, has a less passionate read on America’s condition in the 2000s. It’s true that world he has visited profoundly moves him at times, but he often also observes it with detachment. It isn’t that Zed is cynical; he’s just a future cop who’s been around the past block:
The corpses will constitute quite a mystery, but this is Washington, and the assassination of two nameless men will likely be assumed to be the tip of some iceberg best given a wide berth.”
Zed’s work largely detaches him from sentiment and vigor. But as we read, we slowly learn some important things that shape Zed’s personal life and consequently shape his mission. Zed relearns them with us, as much as he tries not to let them peak to the forefront of his mind.
Grief is funny that way. Time stretches and stretches and you think you’ve eased into it, but then it snaps back at you and you feel you haven’t moved an inch from the moment you first heard the awful news.” 
With the best intentions, he smashed people’s lives and never lost a minute of sleep over it. He only went after the bad guys, after all. That is the Prosecutor’s Fallacy – They are bad guys because I am prosecuting them – and Logiudice was not the first to be fooled by it, so I forgave him for being righteous.”
Massachusetts ADA Andy Barber must recuse himself from a case for probably the most agonizing reason: his son has become the prime suspect.
For its compelling plot that’s apt to keep one engrossed on long flights and layovers, Defending Jacob was a sensation when it came out, especially in legal fiction circles. Author William Landay was a Massachusetts prosecutor and so brought to the novel a wealth of genre expertise. When it comes to the genre, To Kill a Mockingbird sets the bar for literary quality and no other works have quite reached it. John Grisham comes close at his best, and has provided a more workable blueprint for bestseller legal stories that are full of heart. Defending Jacob follows suit. It is that heart which creates a difficult paradox. Realism is great, especially for courtroom dramas, where there is a real-world reference. Real lawyers don’t have much heart though, and usually pursue even the most upsetting cases with little drama. And so though Defending Jacob was praised by some for it’s litigious accuracy, its first person lawyer-narrator does have some rather baroque reflections on the US justice system: The booth was designed to keep the prisoners in, of course: Northern was a level-five maximum security facility that permitted only no-contact visits. But it was I who felt entombed....
Such lines read more like the at times almost Shakespearean monologues of the DAs in Law & Order than speeches from actual practicing attorneys. I love Law & Order and I devoured Defending Jacob. Prospective readers simply be warned, Defending Jacob is more dramatic than procedural. It could obviously be argued that Andy Barber’s son being turned into a suspect awakened unlawyerly emotions in him. But even before that case arises, Barber, a seasoned prosecutor, seems to harbor ideals that usually have faded before law school is finished.
A jury verdict is just a guess – a well intentioned guess, generally, but you simply cannot tell fact from fiction by taking a vote. And yet, despite all that, I do believe in the power of the ritual. I believe in the religious symbolism, the black robes, the marble-columned courthouses like Greek temples. When we hold a trial, we are saying a mass. We are praying together to do what is right and to be protected from danger, and that is worth doing whether or not our prayers are actually heard.”
Barber's thoughts remain artful throughout the story, but with the trial of his son come musings of cynicism. I suspect their verbosity actually adeptly makes them sit with the reader long after the book is put down.
Here is the dirty little secret: the error rate in criminal verdicts is much higher than anyone imagines. Not just false negatives, the guilty criminals who get off scot-free – those “errors” we recognize and accept. They are the predictable result of stacking the deck in the defendant’s favor as we do. The real surprise is the frequency of false positives, the innocent men found guilty. That error rate we do not acknowledge – do not even think about – because it calls so much into question. The fact is, what we call proof is as fallible as the witnesses who produce it, human beings all. Memories fail, eyewitness identifications are notoriously unreliable, even the best intentioned cops are subject to failures of judgment and recall. The human element in any system is always prone to error. Why should the courts be any different? They are not.”
The book is an ongoing cycle of Barber resigning to his miserable situation inside of a miserable system:
A lie, but a white lie…. He did not flinch as he delivered the statement. I did not flinch at it either. The point of a trial is to reach the right result, which requires constant recalibration along the way, like a sailboat tacking upwind.”
As his son’s trial goes on he is made to face the fact that the prosecutors are not always the good guys. They at least don’t seem like it when you’re on the defensive end, guilty or not:
A liberal, it turns out, is a conservative who’s been indicted.”
The line above stuck with me the most. It’s a short generalization that reflects a big truth. Establishment types – the conservative and liberal ones, really – usually soften somehow on their previously staunch ideals when their ideals have turned around on them personally. Innocent or not, when you’re being prosecuted you will gain an acute sensitivity to any injustice carried out on you by the system and its agents, even if you were part of or fought for that system. (See, for example, former police commissioner-turned convict Bernie Kerik’s advocacy of criminal justice reform.)
The money man tells himself that by getting rich he is actually enriching others, the artist tells himself that his creations are things of deathless beauty, the soldier tells himself he is on the side of the angels. Me, I told myself that in court I could make things turn out right – that when I won, justice was served. You can get drunk on such thinking”
Defending Jacob is a tragic, engaging work of commercial fiction, full of verse-like truths.
Damaged at last, my wife had become a little like me, a little harder. Damage hardens us all. It will harden you too, when it finds you – and it will find you.” 
Orson Scott Card’s masterpiece, Ender’s Game, has safely rested in the highest rank of sci-fi novels for over thirty years. Whether you’ve seen it featured at the bookstore, know the movie, studied it in high school, or were in the U.S. Marines when it was on their reading list, you’ve heard of Ender’s Game somehow.
I’d been aware of its prominence for years before I actually picked it up (I still haven’t read Anthem.) When the 2013 movie trailer came out, I decided I should read the book before seeing its film adaptation. I really love science fiction, but to this day I don’t read enough of it (there are so many musts!) One chapter into Ender’s Game and I understood that I’d been depriving myself. By the story’s future setting, geopolitical conflict still remains (the book touches on it quite a bit actually) but Earth’s nations are more united than in the 20th century. The extraterrestrial “Buggers” narrowly lost to the humans in a previous conflict; now they’ve built an outpost alarmingly close to Earth and war seems imminent. The globe is searched high and low for children from any country who show tactical promise. Humanity needs someone who can lead their drone fleet against the Buggers. Juvenile cadet Ender Wiggin might just fit the bill. ‘You gold-plated fart,’ said Dink cheerfully, ‘We’re all trying to decide whether your scores up there are a miracle or a mistake.’
If this novel lacks anything it lacks humor, because the quote above is about as funny as it gets. Ender’s Clint Eastwood-style retort here reflects his attitude throughout; he’s a quiet, arrogant, tactical prodigy. He’s also emotionally tortured, abused by an older brother and burdened by the world’s hope that he can one day lead their military to victory. Ender’s Game is told mostly from Ender’s perspective, so the absence of comedy is reasonable enough.
Even when Ender moves to the Battle School space station, away from his sociopath brother, there are plenty of similarly-minded tormentors he has to contend with. He could see Bonzo’s anger growing hot. Hot anger was bad. Ender’s anger was cold, and he could use it. Bonzo’s was hot, and so it used him.”
This and other lines from the novel are what made Ender’s Game recommended reading for the Marine Corps. There’s a lot of psychological material about dealing with problematic comrades, about the strain of sudden great responsibilities and how to deal with them, about how young leadership can best benefit a battle strategy.
It’s great for adult readers, but still written sufficiently for teens, especially ones who might feel like outsiders. Ender isn’t the only character trying to understand his purpose, most of the characters are actually. His sister back on earth is becoming a prominent political writer under a pen-name and she’s made to wrestle between the realities of her literature and her home life: Perhaps it’s impossible to wear an identity without becoming what you pretend to be.”
Ender and his fellow young cadets face a war where allied and enemy lives are at the mercy of their drone controls. This responsibility is addressed at length in Ender’s Game. With the real-life advancement of drone warfare in the 2010’s, Ender’s Game has become an even more useful handbook.
This is a story that will keep you engrossed until the sun peeks up for work or school. Early to bed and early to rise…. makes a man stupid and blind in the eyes.” ‘ |