I don't generally rate thrillers--or other genre novels--with five stars as a matter of literary and critical principle. In the case of this hilarious high comedy, I am delighted to make an exception.

Setting: Florida
I found the monkey creepy and distracting from the overall story, but otherwise this was a fun murder mystery with some funny bits and a fairly interesting cast of characters, all of them a bit caricatured, but good enough for light entertainment. ( )

This was kind of funny. Not laugh out loud (LOL!) funny. More like occasional amused smirk (lol) funny. The mystery was engaging, if a bit drawn out by the side adventures and extraneous activity. The characters were well drawn, if a bit over-the-top and all-over-the-map. This ain't Elmore Leonard, but who is? ( )

Yancy is a police detective demoted to restaurant food inspector while the media circus around his "incident" with married girlfriend that caused his removal dies down. On the down low he is asked to deliver a limb found at the beach & transfer it to another county to avoid tourists leaving. A mystery ensues about who's arm is it, a few murders, travel to the islands, a monstrosity house being built next door to Yancy, & way too many characters and side stories to make this book smooth. I had to go back a page to see if I missed something as the story skipped around. It did eventually tie up some loose ends toward the end but was unsatisfying. I liked the Yancy character and his new girlfriend but half of the other characters could've been eliminated. I also had a hard time trying to figure out the "island" talk & it was irritating to decipher (no mon, why I do sum ting like dot. bey, I gon pudda black coyse on your soul black as det) The book had a lot of funny spots in it and it was clean with no descriptive sex scenes and not a lot of foul language so I upped it a star ( )

So 3.5 really.

Crazy story. very entertaining. ( )