Carl Hiaasen: Skinny Dip

Reviewed by MICHAEL LARSEN

The things that makes this gleeful tale of corruption — Hiaasen's tenth novel — so successful are the superb characters, the detailed, almost-travelogue descriptions of the Florida Everglades, and Big Carl's ready wit, which is much in evidence and picks up the narrative if it ever looks like flagging. Which, to be honest, it doesn't. The man never lets up and anyone with a writing bent should read this book for the concise, sharp editing alone.

The tale is so preposterous that it could almost be true, and Hiaasen's weaving of the various hilarious characters into the plot is ingenious.

Joey Perrone was gullible enough to marry Chaz, a marine biologist who doctors water samples in the Florida Everglades and take payouts from a major environmental polluter.

Chaz is as much a marine biologist as I am a nuclear physicist; he doesn't even know which way the Gulf Stream runs, for goodness sake. Chaz thinks Joey is on to his rather ropey ruse so he pushes her off a cruise ship in the Caribbean.

Joey survives the trip clinging to a bale of Jamaica's finest and ends up on the secluded island of an ex-cop with a payout and a penchant for dysfunctional relationships.

On the mainland, Detective Rolvaag is on to Chaz, but can't quite work out how he did whatever it is he knows he did, if you get me.

Oh, then there's Red Hammernut, the florid polluter in question, and, best of all, Earl Edward O'Toole, known to his colleagues as Tool, a mountain bear of a man who prefers his pizza frozen and spends his spare time shaving his hirsute body to find places to affix fentanyl patches, to which he is addicted. He steals the patches from hospice patients to relieve the pain that a slug embedded in his, er, butt-crack gives him.

And then, folks, it gets weirder. Chaz is as loathsome as could be, Tool is just goddamn weird, Red is bizarre, and Joey and Stranahan (the island dweller) hatch a plot that gives Chaz so much grief you might almost feel sorry for him.

This is hilarious, enlightening, left in its politics — much is made of the pollution of the Everglades — but right on in its chief aim: unbridled entertainment.