One of Carl Hiaasen's best! After strange disappearences and an amputated man in a suitcase shows up, Brian Keyes, private investigator, is intrigued. He and his cop buddy, Al Garcia, get on the case of Los Noches de Deciembre (The nights of December)who are environmental activists gone bad. After a string of murders from the Los Noches de Deciembre, Brian Keyes discovers there will be a grand finale-- which includes a girl he's been crushing on. Twists keep this book fluid and suspenseful, maki More...

A team of unlikely misfits make for some serious humor in what many Florida natives probably secretly dream about, doing away with the tourists. I found myself actually laughing out loud with Hiaasen's sharp and witty humor. The schemes of the antagonists to poetically do-in the tourist market for Southern Florida were quite inventive. Let me just say, part of me was rooting for the alligator. Tourist Season being the first Hiaasen I read I was not at all disappointed. In fact it was quite the o More...

This comedy was published in 1987, but it is based on a modern day premise of over-development. Popular Miami journalist Skip Wiley has formed his own band of terrorists to take back South Florida from the rich developers and Yankee tourists. He has an elderly Native American, an ex-pro football player, and a Cuban revolutionary with faulty bomb making skills to help him fight his cause. There is no one safe from their special brand of terror.

Brian Keyes is a journalist turned private detective More...

I always am a little disconcerted by Carl Hiaasen books because he confounds me. I never know where he is going with his story. The tone of his books in particular leave me wondering for the first 50 or so pages: is this supposed to be funny? A satire? A detective genre? Serious and sad? A thriller? A quick beach read? Tourist Season struck me the same as other books by CH. Bad things happen to innocent people as well as characters who are obviously to be booed whenever they appear. Since most o More...

Mummoja alligaattorien ruoaksi

Carl Hiaasenin postomoderni kioskiviihdedekkari sijoittuu Floridaan ja lähemmin Miamiin sekä enimmäkseen lähiseuduille.

Päähenkilöinä ovat marlowemainen yksityisetsivä Brian Keyes, Sunin toimittaja Skip Wiley sekä jälkimmäisen terrorijärjestön "La Noche di Deciembren" ydinjoukko eli futaaja Wilson, intiaani sekä kuubalainen pakolainen. Kolmiodraamaa on saatu aikaiseksi, sillä Keyesin entinen naisystävä majailee Skipin luona.

Kirjan junnaavat ja ylipitkillä dialogeilla More...

Growing up in South Florida, you realize that there are certain unwritten rules for living here. Some are obvious ("Thou shalt own at least one Jimmy Buffett album.") Others are learned from experience ("Thou shalt add thirty minutes of drive time to any location during Snow Bird season.") One of my favorites, though, I only learned about five years ago:

"Carl Hiaasen understands our screwed up state, and thou shalt read his novels for insight."

I was introduced to Carl's works via word of mouth w More...

This is the first time I've ever read this author. I really enjoyed his way of writing. Lots of details and information without getting bogged down with them. This book is about a guy Skip Wily, who thinks all the tourists in Florida should leave and let the state go back to wilderness. He's a reporter for a newspaper, likeable and poplar, so when he goes off the deep end and starts his own revolutionary group to get the tourists to move, it kind of surprises a few people. As tourists start comi More...

We enter the zany world of the Florida crime novel at its inception with this Carl Hiaasen debut. In later works by Hiaasen, Leonard, Dorsey, and others, there is a sly world-weariness, a black humor tickled by the far-gone condition of the South Florida mentality. This book was written on the cusp of the cynical hilarity to follow.

Tourist Season begins when a typical tourist, an aging Shriner, disappears off a beach. Next, the body of a prominent Miami man is found stuffed in a suitcase, covere More...

This is not Carl Hiaason's best book, but it is well worth a read.

What is funny about a bunch of outlandish characters stranded in Florida after a storm? Well, they aren't exactly stranded. Most of them are there by choice. The jerk, of course, is not. What is funny is the characters themselves, and in this particular story, the characters are the plot.

Mostly Carl Hiaason writes interesting mysteries, but here there is no mystery to solve. The readers knows all from the beginning, but the char More...

This gets my vote as Hiaasen's best. It's one of his earliest and it has a passion and originality that I love. And it is so outrageously funny! The plot is convoluted and preposterous, a world only Hiassen can imagine, although he has said that many of his plot episodes come straight from the seriously wacky news in Florida. Apparently he has great subject matter there. The title Tourist Season, I realized soon after beginning it, is a play on words--Tourist Season when all the sun-loving visit More...

Carl Hiaasen's works are usually very funny, intelligent, witty, creative, with a happy ending. What could you want more from an entertaining lite read? The imaginative characters, the adventure, the great use of irony and sarcasm, he keeps you guessing how things could possibly all work out for the best, and they do in his books which I like. I always find good qualities to admire in his heros, and can easily despise the villians, cheering when they meet their demise...in whatever creative fash More...

Carl Hiaasen's supervisors at the Miami Herald must have been nervous about him publishing this book. After reading so many of his books, it's quite obvious that he's living vicariously through his villain Skip Wiley, a newspaper columnist who's gone off the deep end and decided to start killing tourists in order to scare them away, effectively emptying Florida and allowing it to revert to nature. Oh yes, and using his knowledge of the media to attract attention to his cause. Skip was the first More...

If you haven't read anything by Carl Hiaasen, you should pick up one of his novels right away. Ironic, irreverent and funny as hell, Hiaasen writes about South Florida and is a columnist for the Miami Herald.

Adoption of environmental warriors as major characters and the destruction of the natural world as a problem space has become a veritable cottage industry among fiction writers. Mixing violence with humor, Tourist Season is a send-up of greed, sex and obsession and is not to be missed.

By co More...

The book "Tourist Season" by Carl Hiaasen was a good book for a lot of reasons. "Tourist Season" tells the effect of a few murders has on Miami, Florida and how the main character must work to solve them and prevent more from happening. Not only did it have a good plot and a good variety of characters but it also had good meanings and messages behind it.
The plot of the book follows Brian Keys, a journalist turned privet investigator as he tries to solve the murder of the head of the city's chamb More...

It works...to a degree. Hiaasen works to a formula: single/separated/divorced male stuck with an adventure/challenge is forced to assert himself during difficult times. Potentially there is always something more there but Hiaasen is obsessed with a sort of libertarian solution that , in this case, warps the novel . If things are so bad, why not destory it and begin again?

It's as American as apple pie. Iraq, Vietnam, Afghanistan...offers a sort of logic that is played out in Florida.

I've read all More...

My book slump is over! I went about 3 weeks without finishing a single book and it did serious damage to my 2009 pace.

Tourist Season is my third Hiaasen book of 2009 and it's another fun read, full of oddball characters in Florida. They are all kind of the same--multiple characters wind in and out of the story, eccentrics, funny situations. As I said before, reminds me some of Elmore Leonard--which is a very good thing.

This novel involves revolutionaries who want to drive out tourists in the M More...

I've read a couple of young adult books by Hiaasen, but this is my first adult read and I LOVED it! He's hilarious in his sense of humor, his twisted view on people and it was a quick paced read all around.

In Tourist Season, he writes of a disgruntled columnist who plots murderous revenge on the seasonal visitors to Florida. Along with a copule of his misfit friends, they hope to return Florida to it's natural state of pristine beauty.

The madcap murder, violence and injustice visited on innocent More...

Someone once called "Nancy" the perfect comic strip because before you decide you're not going to read it, you already have.

I've picked up Hiaasen's books because they are a quick read on a plane - a guilty pleasure, but not so guilty that I wouldn't pick up another. The screwball characters seemed forced at times and the plots gimmicky, but they are well-written and funny.

In Tourist Season, Hiaasen's humor is intact, but the characters aren't overshadowed by the wacky plot. And the plot is pre More...

Found this book on the "take one, leave one" shelf at a motel in central Nebraska, and I didn't note the date of publication (1986) until I wondered why this clever Florida PI had a beeper and kept searching for telephone booths to check in with his service, as opposed to using his cell phone. Tourist Season (as in, Deer Season or Wild Turkey Season) has a story line made more interesting to this Cornhusker by the fact that it centered around an Orange Bowl game with Nebraska vs. Notre Dame. It' More...

My first Carl Hiaasen novel... Interesting... totally different than anything I've read. Honestly, I'm not sure what to think. I liked it, but I'm not sure I loved it. It will definitely stick in my head like a Coen Brother's movie, and I suspect I'll like it more on reflection.

I didn't find myself "vested" in the main character until late in the story... but I had definite reactions to his quirky characters. I was actually rooting for a few to die torturous deaths. If I could vote in fractiona More...

A humorous, but frightning mystery with a serious environmental message. Journalist, Skip Wiley, a white native of Florida can't tolerate what northern immigrants have done to his now over-populated state of Florida. He puts together a terrorist team consisting of an anti-Castro Cuban, a black ex-football player, and a casino rich Seminole Indian. Each has his reason for joining in on the murders of their hunting 'tourist season.' Hiaasen was creative to put together three totally different mino More...

Frankly I was bored with this novel for the first four chapters. Eventually I started to understand the story line and it became a can't put down type of novel. The main idea of the novel is that tourists and those who go from tourist to homeowners can inspire real estate people to wreck havoc on the environment as they try to make a fast buck. The villians in this novel are basically people who want to protect nature from those who want to destroy it. Their solutions, are what makes this an int More...

This book started out slow and confusing and got slower and more confusing the further I read. I was going to rate this a one or two star, however, about three-fourths of the way through it started making sense and the novel got a lot better. I wasn't all that happy with the ending. No one does Hitchcock like Hitchcock. The book portrayed the police and reporters as inept. I could understand the part about the reporters being bumbling idiots if this book were written today, however, its copyrigh More...

Finally I am trying to finish the books I started in last few days...couple of weeks...this one is unlike any I had read...

There is no suspense...no thrill as well to be honest...it has its own kind of humor...and probably somewhere lies in it the fun, at least in the eyes of the author...

It's a good read, if you like reading...definitely not something I will recommend to someone who doesn't read for the sake of reading...might be good, but there are far better options read...at least, per my ta More...

Interesting mystery novel, written with lots of humor. The story is about a group of terrorists trying to return Florida to it's original inhabitants: Indians and animals. The author is partially empathetic to the cause, occasionally portraying the greedy American businessmen as the villains rather than the terrorists.

On top of regular mystery novel ingredients (good guys, bad guys and the battles between them), the story describes an intricate relationship between the media and the police depar More...

I've been nibbling away at Hiassen's output off and on for several years. At a recent book sale, I happened upon several titles I hadn't read, including this one. It's not his first publication - nor is it his best - but it is funny and violent. Few people can make violence funny - Hiassen does it very well, indeed. Read other reviews for the story line but do pick this up and read it if you enjoy dark humor, smart satire and poking fun at savagely stereotypical characters, good and bad. South F More...

Hiassen is a fun read always!

Tourist Season by Carl Hiaasen has a little of everything: seemingly pointless murders, inept newspaper reporters, crusty police detectives, egotistical columnists, eco-terrorists, beautiful women, fezzed Shriners, negligent lawyers, vengeful Seminoles, washed up ex-football players, and shallow tourism promoters all woven into a bizarre plot that is sometimes satirical, sometimes farcical, and sometimes gruesome.

A curious and probably unintended aspect of the book is occasional reference to te More...