Squirm

by Carl Hiaasen
276 pgs

Squirm is one of Carl Hiaasen's books written for younger readers (but still entertaining for adults) and it features Billy Dickens, a kid who lives in Florida with his mother and sister. His father left them when Billy was 3 years old, and since the only contact they've had from him since is the check he sends every month like clockwork, and since his mother always cuts up the envelope with the return address into tiny pieces, Billy doesn't even know where he lives, let alone what kind of a man he was, or what he does for a living.

But that hasn't stopped him from trying to learn more about his father. And when one month his mother fails to cut up the envelope into small enough pieces, Billy is able to figure out his father's current address, and using almost all of the money he's saved up from working at the supermarket, buys a plane ticket to Montana to go see him.

While in Montana, Billy meets his father's new wife and stepdaughter, who are members of the Crow Nation, but he never sees his father. It seems like even his new family doesn't know much about the man. They tell him he has some secret government job involving drones and that they don't know where he is most of the time.

But as Billy will eventually learn, even though his father wasn't involved in raising him, Billy still shares a lot in common with him. And eventually, those similarities will bring them together.

Squirm is a fun read. Hiaasen's humor is still there, even if it's bridled for younger audiences, but it's still enough to have made me smile often throughout.

★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

Skink--No Surrender

by Carl Hiaasen
281 pgs

Skink -- No Surrender is Carl Hiaasen’s newest book written for younger readers. This time around he borrows one of his more colorful characters from a few of his books written for “older” readers: Skink. Skink is a one-eyed, unkempt, half-naked homeless man who was once the governor of Florida, but who decided one day to walk away from the job, and society as a whole, so he could begin doling out acts of retribution against individuals and companies that didn’t share his sense of stewardship for the fragile Floridian ecosystem.

Richard is a 16-year-old, who often walks at night along the beach with his cousin Malley hoping to catch a glimpse of a mother loggerhead sea turtle laying her eggs. But Malley fails to show up one night for a scheduled search, and when Richard tries to contact her to find out where she is, he discovers she has left town with a guy she met and had been communicating with in a chat room.

While the police quickly become involved in searching for her, Richard believes he knows her best and therefore has the best chance of finding her. So, he sets out to find her and bring her back home. Fortunately for him (and us, the readers), he’s accompanied by the crazy old man he met the night before on the beach, who was buried completely in the sand, breathing through a straw, waiting to ambush anyone looking for turtle eggs to sell on the black market.

Once again, Hiaasen’s love for his home state, with its beauty, crazy inhabitants, and deadly creatures, is obvious while he tells his story. It’s a fun and entertaining book, and told as only Hiaasen could.

★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

Razor Girl

by Carl Hiaasen
333 pgs

Authors who live in, and write stories set in the state of Florida, often include characters in their stories whom those of us outside of Florida would consider farcical caricatures, people who couldn’t possibly exist in real life. Authors like Elmore Leonard, Dave Barry, Tim Dorsey, Bob Morris, and Jeffery Lindsay are some of the ones which come to mind. But Carl Hiaasen is in a class all by himself for his ability to pack such an eclectic, bizarre, and hilarious cast of characters into a story and then it’s almost as if he lets them loose on the page and watches as the mayhem ensues.

There’s not a better example of Hiaasen’s rare gift than Razor Girl. It begins with a minor car crash involving a reality TV agent named Lane Coolman and Merry Mansfield, a beautiful woman who gives the term “distracted driving” a whole new meaning. The accident was intentionally orchestrated by Merry’s employer, who ends up kidnapping Coolman for ransom. Coolman is the agent for Buck Nance, the star of a series called Bayou Brethren, a Duck Dynasty-style reality show about a family of Cajun rooster farmers. The accident leaves Buck without adult supervision at a Key West bar in which he gets himself into hot water with a series of racist and homophobic jokes and then disappears without a trace.

Former-cop and current health inspector Andrew Yancy becomes involved in trying to locate both missing men. But Yancy has problems of his own to deal with. Not only is he trying to get his police job back—which he lost after assaulting his mistress’s husband with a portable vacuum cleaner—but he’s also trying to prevent a newly-engaged couple, who just bought the property adjacent to his, from building an obnoxious mansion on it, blocking his serene view of the Keys. The man is a high-profile class action attorney, who is currently both suing the makers of a pharmaceutical deodorant gel which causes random tissue deformities and life-threatening erections, and, who is addicted to using the gel himself--much to the delight and consternation of his fiancé, delight due to the latter, consternation due to the former.

Somehow Hiaasen always manages to incorporate the over-the-top cast of characters he assembles in his mind into an elaborate, fast-paced, and hilarious story, which alternately makes you laugh, blush, and shake your head in disbelief at the absurd spectrum of humanity, which the state of Florida seems determined to continually stretch.

★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

Skin Tight

by Carl Hiaasen
319 pgs

Dr. Rudy Graveline is the director of a highly-successful surgical center in Florida. The rich and the famous come to him for tummy tucks, facelifts, boob jobs, and any other procedure they believe will keep them looking young and beautiful. He has built a reputation for himself that has made him a very wealthy, and morally corrupt man.

But Rudy has some skeletons in his closet, secrets that if discovered would mean the end of his career, and more importantly, the end of his extravagant way of life. The first is that he was never trained nor certified as a plastic surgeon. He earned his M.D. from a questionable medical school, and he was barely even able to accomplish that. After his patients are anesthetized, Rudy usually steps aside and lets someone else perform the procedure. But every once in a while his ego gets the best of him and he attempts the surgery himself--usually with disastrous results. One of those occasions led to another one of his secrets: he recently accidentally killed a young woman during a botched nose job.

When he learns that Mick Stranahan, a retired investigator for the Florida State Attorney is looking into the girl's disappearance, Rudy decides to hire someone to get rid of him.

Skin Tight is one of Hiaasen's earlier books, so when I say it's classic Hiaasen, it really is. It has everything that makes his books so fun to read. His characters are as hilarious as his plots. His villains are threatening, but absurd, and the combination results in books that are a lot of fun to read.

★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

Scat

by Carl Hiaasen
371 pgs

Nick and Marta are not crazy about their teacher, Mrs. Starch. She's strict and mean, and makes one of her students write a 500-word essay on zits when he bites off (and eats) a pencil she was pointing at his face. But when a wildfire breaks out while the class is on a field trip to the Black Vine Swamp and Mrs. Starch is separated from the group and then doesn't show up to school the next day, Nick and Marta believe that there's more going on than what they're being told by the school's Headmaster. 

Their investigation take them back into the swamp where they stumble across two things: an illegal drilling operation being conducted by a shady oil company, and evidence (see book title) of a highly endangered panther in the area. They eventually learn that the panther abandoned her cub during the wildfire and their mission evolves into reuniting the cub with its mother. 

Scat is one of a few books that Carl Hiaasen has written for a younger audience (10 and up). His others are Hoot, Chomp, Flush, and Skink--No Surrender. Each of them has an environmental backstory and will appeal to both younger and older audiences alike. They're the type of books that parents can read to elementary-age children and will enjoy just as much as their children will.

★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

Bad Monkey

by Carl Hiaasen
317 pgs

Until recently, Andrew Yancy was an officer with the Miami Sheriff's Department. But for the past few months he's been relegated down to the position of Health Inspector, visiting the local eating establishments and either shutting them down, or writing them up for violations that cause his stomach to churn and which have led to some undesired weight loss. But a severed arm in his freezer may be his ticket back on to the force.

The arm, which had been reeled in by a vacationing fisherman, and which in classic Hiaasen fashion, was landed with the middle finger extended, appears to have belonged to a wealthy man currently under investigation for Medicare fraud. Yancy doesn't buy into the theory that the arm's owner was eaten by sharks when his boat capsized at sea and he's determined to prove that his wife killed him for the insurance money. Yancy believes that if he can prove his theory correct, that he'll no longer have to work on the "roach patrol" and can get his old job back on the force.

If that were a simple or straightforward task to accomplish, then it wouldn't be a story by Carl Hiaasen. Instead, Yancy has to deal with numerous surprises and a host of outlandish characters, including the monkey from the Pirates of the Caribbean movies.

Bad Monkey is Carl Hiaasen at his best. It's hilarious, bawdy, and highly entertaining. If you don't like Hiaasen's books, you won't like this one. But if you do, this one could be one of your favorites.

★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

Star Island

Star Island by Carl Hiaasen

In Star Island Hiaasen takes aim at the absurdity of today's pop culture. Cherry Pye was fifteen years old when she was transformed into a pop star by a producer at Jailbait Records. Now, at 22, her recording career is barely afloat. Her appetite for drugs, alcohol, and rock and roll drummers has forced those closest to her to hire Ann DeLusia, who resembles Cherry in every way except for the level head on her shoulders.

Ann's job is to make public appearances disguised as Cherry Pye during the lip-sincer's frequent stints in rehab. Ann is an aspiring actress who grudgingly accepts the job of Cherry's body double because the pay is good. But when she's kidnapped one night by an inept paparazzo who thinks Cherry Pye is going to be his golden ticket to fame, she decides that if she ever regains her freedom, the time might be right for a career change.

True to form, Hiaasen adds an ensemble of characters to the story that provide an extra level of ridiculousness. There are Cherry's parisitic parents, who's only concern is that their golden goose will stop laying eggs. There's Chemo, a hitman recently released from prison hired by Cherry's producer as her bodyguard. Chemo lost part of his arm during a barracuda attack years ago and decided on a custom-built Weed Whacker for a prosthesis instead of a hook or a claw because he figured it would come in more "handy" (sorry). There's also Skink, the ex-Governor of Florida, who left public office years ago in order to live in the swamp among the alligators, dining on roadkill, and sabotaging developers' ongoing efforts to ruin his state. This time Skink's sights are set on Jackie Sebago, a crooked developer who's first interaction with Skink results a trip to the emergency room to have a sea urchin removed from his more sensitive nether region.

I'd rate Star Island as an average offering from Carl Hiaasen, but with the asterisk that average for Hiaasen is better than most books out there.

★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆