Books I’ve read

I was a little hesitant about this one, as it purported to be funny - and hype on the cover of a book that says ‘funny’ doesn’t always turn out that way! This one, though, hit the spot. It was very entertaining and made me laugh out loud more than a couple of times - partly because of an unexpected use of language, mostly because of the situations in which the protagonists found themselves.

Hiaasen writes very well, keeps the tension going in this comedy thriller about an ex-reporter turned private eye (with en ex-girlfriend who is now shacked up with the baddy) getting tangled up with a quartet of oddballs who have convinced themselves that they share the belief that Florida should be completely emptied and handed back to the alligators and the Seminole tribes.

Whilst I can’t entirely disagree with the sentiment, I couldn’t condone their methods - which include bombings, poisonous snakes and a hungry crocodile (an endangered species, this one, called Pavlov).

The main bad guy is another reporter - a long-established and well-respected one, by all accounts. He is supported by a Seminole tribal chief who’s made a fortune running a major bingo operation, a junkie ex-football linebacker and an incompetent anti-Castro anti-communist Cuban revolutionary who has already been thrown out of one group of terrorists.

The climax centres around a Christmas/New Year period during Miami’s Orange Bowl Festival. We are taken on brief trips to the Bahamas, the Everglades - where Pavlov lives, and a disastrous cruise in the bay.

Whether good triumphs over evil is for me to know and for you to find out, by reading it.

It runs close to 500 pages in my edition, published by Pan books in 1992, though the story is a 1986 copyright. How come I never saw any of his stuff before? My bad luck, I suppose; but I’ll be watching out now.

Available from Alibris.co.uk and Abebooks.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 14th, 2007 at 8:35 pm and is filed under Humour. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.