Hiassen is definitely back on top form with crime meets black comedy. Scumbag husbands, wives who aren’t dead and the Florida Everglades as a backdrop. Romantic and with page turning pace – splendid.
Joey Perrone is a woman with a mission. She’s just been pushed overboard from a cruise liner into the icy Atlantic Ocean by Chaz, her scumbag of a husband – and survived to tell the tale. She knows that Chaz is not the brightest marine scientist in the world – hell, he can’t even work out which way the Gulf Stream runs. And if there’s one place he hates it’s the Florida Everglades, an area he’s supposed to be working to protect. But he’s on to something; and it’s something so big and so lucrative it’s worth killing for. Joey turns to the man who’s pulled her from the sea: former cop, current loner, Mick Stranahan. And with a little help from her friends, Mick’s dog, and a few of Chaz’s enemies, they hit on a scheme that should drive Chaz mad, while allowing her to get even. As Joey haunts and taunts her homicidal husband; as Chaz’s cold-blooded cohorts in crime grow uneasy with his increasingly erratic behaviour; as Mick discovers that six failed marriages have not killed his ability to fall in love all over again, Carl Hiaasen takes us on a hilarious, romantic, page-turning journey through the mayhem created by the human heart.
Carl Hiaasen was born and raised in Florida, where he still lives. He is a prize-winning journalist with a regular column in the Miami Herald and many articles in varied magazines. He started writing crime fiction in the early 1980s and has recently branched out into children's books; he has also had several works of non-fiction published.
