Having never read any Hiaasen, I picked up Skinny Dip on an outdoor book cart for a $1 and figured I'd give him a shot. This is definitely a summer book and a whole lot of fun. I finished it over the course of this last, sweltering weekend, and while my vague (though expanded) sense of Florida hasn't really improved my perceptions of the state (it seems sort of like a combination of Arizona and Las Vegas with a beach), I did briefly get enthralled by the idea of tooling around off-coast Floridian islands and eating a lot of shellfish on a beach. which actually still sounds great.

The book is satisfying for a variety of reasons. Firstly, Hiaasen is adept with absurd humor and cultivates the type of amusing morbidity that I haven't really read in such full effect since reading Roald Dahl books as a kid. In James and the Giant Peach, James' parents are killed in a freak zoo escape/rampage. In Skinny Dip, Joey Perrone's parents are killed in a plane crash with their pet bear, who was, we're told, strapped into the co-pilot seat and being fed Bailey's Irish Cream right before the nosedive. Another character is dispatched when a sky diver plummets from the sky after a parachute malfunction. In effect, Hiaasen's off-kilter Florida is one which is just one shade too wacky to be taken as reality, and yet when combined, all of the eccentricities and odd happenings and general absurdity seem to fit together in a believable fashion.

Secondly, there's the plot. It's snappy and really action-driven, and follows the sort of vicarious, righteous vengeance scenario that you know it will from the start. Joey's louse of a husband (Chaz--and excellent louse of a husband name) throws her off a cruise liner and then she manages to float to an island where she takes up with a craggy, antisocial ex-cop who is twice her age. There, the clever team comes up with all sorts of cinematic ways to mess with Chaz's head "from beyond the grave." From the start, you know that Chaz is going to get his, that Joey and the ex-cop will fall in love, and that the good guys will triumph in the end. All that remains is to wait and see what kind of crazy antics and hilarity will ensue. And that's the fun.

Hiaasen is obviously a great environmentalist and though Skinny Dip is all in good fun, it's moral about the pillaging of the everglades is anything but. His commitment to his environmental message is admirable, although it occasionally comes off as a little Fern Gully with the Bad Nature Killers taking an increasingly farcical attitude towards the Everglades that they are consciously pumping oodles of fertilizers into. After awhile, there's no need for the references to how much they hate recycling, or how they try to shoot baby rabbits on the highway for target practice. We know they're bad people already...

Anyway, great fun summer book.