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22 December 2023
They say that revenge is sweet, and Joey Perrone finds it tempting when her husband Chaz throws her overboard on their second anniversary cruise in Carl Hiaasen’s Skinny Dip. What Chaz doesn’t remember is that as a former champion swimmer in college, swimming is what Joey does best. He’s so conceited that he doesn’t even imagine that she will survive. That she will also meet just the right person to help her find out why Chaz did what he did and make him pay, is beyond anything that he could comprehend.
Finding Joey unconscious, but clinging nude to a floating bale of abandoned marijuana, Mick Stranahan, a retired cop, pulls her ashore on his private island in southern Florida. They discover that Chaz has been doctoring water sample results for his employer, a politically connected mega-farmer who has been allowing fertilizer to run off into the Everglades. Enlisting the help of her brother Corbett, Joey (whom everyone believes dead) and Mick devise a plan to reveal to Chaz that they know that her \"death\" was not the accident or suicide he claims.
I know that, so far, this sounds like a very serious book, but the cast of characters is so out there that it is a very funny and enjoyable read. Every character seems to have some weird quirk, from the hulking henchman who sneaks into nursing homes and steals pain patches off of the sleeping patients (not to mention his \"garden\" of roadside memorial crosses), to the detective on the case who has two pet snakes that have escaped and could well be the cause of the missing pets in his condo building. Even Chaz himself is basically a comic book character, so full of himself that he doesn’t realize how horribly wrong his plan has gone.
Skinny Dip is the second book I have read by Carl Hiaasen. The books have a real \"Florida\" feel, like the old Travis McGee books by John D. MacDonald. In fact, Stranahan reminded me of Travis McGee in a big way. Hiaasen’s tendency to take real problems, like the contamination of the Everglades, and add outlandish people and circumstances to tell his tales, make for just plain delectable entertainment. I left the book feeling that justice had been done in a karmic kind of way.
Finding Joey unconscious, but clinging nude to a floating bale of abandoned marijuana, Mick Stranahan, a retired cop, pulls her ashore on his private island in southern Florida. They discover that Chaz has been doctoring water sample results for his employer, a politically connected mega-farmer who has been allowing fertilizer to run off into the Everglades. Enlisting the help of her brother Corbett, Joey (whom everyone believes dead) and Mick devise a plan to reveal to Chaz that they know that her \"death\" was not the accident or suicide he claims.
I know that, so far, this sounds like a very serious book, but the cast of characters is so out there that it is a very funny and enjoyable read. Every character seems to have some weird quirk, from the hulking henchman who sneaks into nursing homes and steals pain patches off of the sleeping patients (not to mention his \"garden\" of roadside memorial crosses), to the detective on the case who has two pet snakes that have escaped and could well be the cause of the missing pets in his condo building. Even Chaz himself is basically a comic book character, so full of himself that he doesn’t realize how horribly wrong his plan has gone.
Skinny Dip is the second book I have read by Carl Hiaasen. The books have a real \"Florida\" feel, like the old Travis McGee books by John D. MacDonald. In fact, Stranahan reminded me of Travis McGee in a big way. Hiaasen’s tendency to take real problems, like the contamination of the Everglades, and add outlandish people and circumstances to tell his tales, make for just plain delectable entertainment. I left the book feeling that justice had been done in a karmic kind of way.
artid
2779
Old Image
7_3_hiaasen.jpg
issue
vol 7 - issue 03 (nov 2004)
section
entertainmental