This is slapstick satire where one chaotic situation bounces on to another. Full of wacky characters and improbable scenarios and set in the dangerous world of Florida’s ‘gator-strewn Everglades, it’s just the most ludicrous fun you’ll have for a long time.
July 2009 Guest Editor Louise Wener on CARL HIAASEN I started reading Carl Hiaasen when I was traveling in Florida researching my third book,The Half Life of Stars. The book is set in and around Miami, as is most of Hiaasen’s fiction. Hiaasen is the master of satirical, comic crime writing – I can’t tolerate the bleak slasher kind – and his characters are gloriously flamboyant. The plots are fast and furious and he brilliantly lampoons everything from rock music to politics to our obsession with eco causes and plastic surgery.
Passionate and willful Honey Santana is taking rude, gullible telemarketer Boyd Shreave and his less than enthusiastic mistress, Eugenie Fonda, into the mangroves of Florida's Ten Thousand Islands for a gentle lesson in humility. What Honey doesn't know is that she's being followed by her obsessed former employer, Piejack, and her still-smitten ex-husband, Perry, with their protective and wise-beyond-his-years twelve-year-old son, Fry. And when they all arrive on Dismal Key, they don't know the island is occupied by Sammy Tigertail, a failed alligator wrestler trying like hell to be left alone despite the Florida State coed clinging to his side. South Florida has never been quite so hilarious as it is in this outrageous tale of one woman's single-handed quest to eradicate greed and enforce civility in her corner of the Sunshine State.
