It’s that incendiary combination that makes Hiaasen’s books unique, why all attempts to duplicate him have failed. Rage at corrupt politicians, greedy developers, corporate polluters, environmental desecrators, crooked lawyers, avaricious doctors, cheats, scoundrels, scam artists, zealots, and lowlifes of every description. Something else much more primal drives them: rage.
Sure, Carl Hiaasen’s novels are funny-sometimes laugh-out-loud absurd, sometimes so laceratingly sharp you have to check if your fingers are bleeding-but comedy is only their delivery system. Comic noir was on the upswing, and the cover letter usually included a comparison along the lines of “you know, like Carl Hiaasen.”īut they were always wrong, and they still are. (Aug.As a crime and suspense editor, I noticed a trend in the submissions I began receiving in the 1990s. In his sixth novel, less a straightforward thriller than a sprawling slice of life, Hiaasen dexterously resolves his many subplots, uniting the principals in a climactic chase across the swampland-while adding sting to his perpetual theme: the unrelenting depredation of Florida's cultural and natural heritage.
Also mobilized are a mob enforcer with a penchant for crucifixions, a voodoo-practicing building inspector and a number of menacing escaped animals. Transforming a suburban sprawl into a lawless frontier, the hurricane puts on a collision course a demented cast of tourists, scam artists and eccentrics: New York ad exec Max Lamb, who decides to spice up his Orlando honeymoon by taking his bride and his camcorder into the teeth of the storm Skink, the swamp-dwelling former Florida governor (last seen in Native Tongue) who kidnaps Max in an effort to teach him to respect the land Edie March, a seductive grifter who hatches a half-baked personal-injury scam with the help of Snapper, a sadistic ex-con and Augustine, the altruistic son of a jailed drug smuggler, who juggles skulls to relax. Hiaasen's latest madcap romp across southern Florida presents an apocalyptic panorama of the region in the wake of a storm much like Hurricane Andrew.
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