Review by Booklist Review
If you share Carl Hiaasen's view of southern Florida as a "culture in terminal moral hemorrhage," then it's hard not to see a hurricane as a form of biblical revenge--nature taking a little of its own back from the neon jungle. The problem, however, as Hiaasen shows us in his latest novel, set in the days immediately following Hurricane Andrew, is that Florida's mutant forms of human sleaze have the survival instincts of cockroaches. Like carpetbaggers descending on the post-Civil War South, the con artists, looters, and thrill seekers who emerge in Andrew's aftermath bring a new and virulent form of pestilence to an already ravaged landscape. Hiaasen follows the activities of a typically bizarre group of hurricane scammers: a can-do girl who, frustrated in her attempts to sleep with a Kennedy, hopes to perpetrate an insurance scam; her deformed, ex-con partner, the archetypal loose cannon; a Madison Avenue advertising executive intent on videotaping the carnage to amuse the guys back at the office; and a crooked building examiner who approved many of the substandard houses that Andrew summarily blew away. Swirling around this dangerous though hysterically inept bunch is the enigmatic Skink, ex-governor turned hermit and avenging angel. Committed to a radical "pest control" plan, Skink, who has surfaced in previous Hiaasen adventures, drives the action with a deranged yet altruistic frenzy. Combining slapstick nightmare, black comedy, and moral outrage in just the right proportions, Hiaasen's surrealistic vision of Florida on the brink of Armageddon bears comparison to Nathanael West's Hollywood and Malcolm Lowry's Mexico. (Reviewed July 1995)0679419829Bill Ott
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Hiaasen's latest seriocomic Florida thriller spent seven weeks on PW's bestseller list. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Après Strip Tease (LJ 8/93), le déluge. Hiaasen returns to familiar ground-southern Florida-in this account of the schemers who spring up in the aftermath of a devastating hurricane. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A hurricane, passing over southern Florida, leaves in its untidy wake the usual Hiaasen carnival of knaves and fools. Listen up now, because there's going to be a quiz on how the hurricane changes everybody's plans. Animal farmer Augustine Mojaki suddenly finds himself on the road hunting down a covey of escaped snakes, monkeys, rare birds, and the occasional water buffalo. Advertising exec Max Lamb, determined to spice up his honeymoon with bride Bonnie by videotaping the storm's devastation, falls into the clutches of Skink, a demented one- eyed kidnapper. Edie Marsh, who came to the Sunshine State planning to seduce and file rape charges against one of the younger male Kennedys, joins forces with a recent manslaughter alumnus to fake an insurable accident, but then lucks into smarmy trailer salesman Tony Torres's plot to scam his own insurer and, incidentally, his estranged wife. Tony is in turn urgently sought by professional goon Ira Jackson, bent on avenging the mother who died in one of the double-wides Tony guaranteed would withstand gale-force winds, and by Ira's trailer-park neighbor Levon Stichler, bereft not of his wife but of the urn containing her ashes. Jim Tile, the black highway patrolman sworn to protect Skink's anonymitydid we mention that the maniac kidnapper is also a former governor of Florida?gets derailed when his intimate fellow officer Brenda Rourke is savagely beaten after a routine roadside pulloveras if anything routine ever happened in this riotously corrupt world. And don't worry about the cast members: When they wear out, Hiaasen just slips new ones into the deck. Here's the quiz, then: Is a new bride abandoned by her husband more likely to find happiness with a peripatetic zookeeper or the husband's kidnapper? Lacks the powerfully satiric center that gave Strip Tease (1993) such an edge, but sinfully madcap all the same. If you're not laughing by page six, you need a complete checkup. (First printing of 200,000; author tour)
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