»Nature Girl

Carl Hiaasen's latest takes the reader through a romp in the Everglades with a dysfunctional cast of characters: a conflicted half-Seminole, half-Irish runaway with a propensity for inadvertent kidnapping; an odiferous, lecherous fishmonger with a disfigured hand, the result of a botched plastic surgery, itself the result of a vengeful attack; a drug-running vice-mayor, on a quest to protect his trippily unstable ex-wife from the fishmonger's affections; the ex-wife herself, the novel's protagonist, Honey; and the half-witted unwitting couple she has snared in order to teach a lesson in manners, all brought about as the result of an unwelcome telemarketing call that interrupted her dinner.
Into this tableau wander a private eye seeking triple-X-rated evidence of infidelity on behalf of the telemarker's pizza-heiress wife; a rambunctionous co-ed who wants to stick it to her family; and Honey's twelve-year-old son, wise beyond his years. The plot is at times painfully contrived, at times delightfully hilarious; the book has engaging characters, honed by years of Hiaasen's reporting for the Miami Herald. Next to Pittsburgh, Florida has the weirdest collection of criminal misfits and nutcases in North America.
Hiaasen's writing is as giddy and easy-on-the-eyes as Elmore Leonard's or Damon Runyon's, and inhabits much the same world of happy-go-lucky misfits and haphazard criminals. Without pretenses to literary excellent, Hiaasen achieves in his writing what almost every November novelist sets out to: a memorable read.