Skinny Dip - Carl Hiaasen

   2004; 355 pages.  New Author? : No.  Genre : Crime-Humor; Florida Noir; Satire.  Overall Rating : 8½*/10.

    To celebrate their second wedding anniversary, Chaz Perrone treated his wife Joey to a Florida cruise.  It was so romantic.  Joey adored it.

    Now, it's the last night of the cruise, and he's topped it off by suggesting they take one last stroll around the deck.  Yes, it’s way past midnight, and yes, anyone with any sense is in bed, resting up for the back-to-reality that tomorrow will bring.  But it’s still a perfectly romantic way to cap off a fantastic week.

    It’s obvious that the night will end with one last round of passion.  Joey can’t imagine any way this last night of the cruise can go wrong.

    Except when Chaz pushes her overboard, and the ship sails on without her.  Yes, that definitely has ruined the whole ambiance.

What’s To Like...

    Skinny Dip has all the usual tropes in a Carl Hiaasen Florida noir novel:  the resilient female protagonist, hiding out from the fellow who wronged her, and in the arms of a studly, loner-type male protagonist; plus a jaded detective trying to get to the bottom of everything, and a UE (Ultimate Evil) guy who is wrecking the Florida ecosystem in his own diabolical way.

    That may sound banal, but it works because Hiaasen develops each of these, along with various secondary peeps, into unique, quirky, charismatic people.  Even the bad guys are fun to meet.  There aren’t a lot of characters to keep track of; mostly it’s just the five main ones listed above, plus a goon and a granny.

    I chuckled at Benny Middenbock’s bizarre death (which is not a spoiler; he’s Joey’s first husband and is already dead when at the start of the book), and ROFL’d at Chaz’s ill-timed attempts to partake of the wonders of Viagra.  Rolvaag’s two pet albino pythons struck a chord with me; I knew a guy in college that kept a pair of these in his apartment.

    There are 32 chapters covering 355 pages, so it’s easy to find a convenient place to stop reading for the night.  Readers new to Hiaasen should know that there’s a lot of cusswords, meds, booze, sex, and adult situations in any of his Florida noir books; all balanced out by an abundance of wit and satire  This is neither a whodunit nor a police procedural.  Wikipedia calls it a “caper story”, which was a new term to me, and quite apt.

    The ending was a mixed bag.  Things didn’t build to an exciting climax, but there were some neat storyline twists, all the threads were resolved (albeit some in a bittersweet manner), everyone gets their just desserts.  Skinny Dip is a standalone novel.  Amazon claims it is part of a series called Skink, but I beg to differ.  Wikipedia’s entry for the book makes no such mention.

Kewlest New Word. . .

Scrofulous (adj.) : having a diseased run-down appearance.

Others : Pullulating (v.).

Excerpts...

    Glossy with perspiration, Tool lumbered into the kitchen to check on the entrée.  “Three more minutes,” he announced, and walked out.

    “He’s staying here with you?” Rolvaag asked.

    “Yeah.  While his double-wide gets fumigated.”

    “What’s with the highway crosses?”

    “I’m not sure,” Chaz Perrone said, “but it might have something to do with him being a deranged, half-witted sociopath.”

    “Right.”

    “He claims to be carrying a bullet slug in the crack of his butt.”

    “Everybody’s got problems,” Rolvaag said.  (pg. 180)

    “Joey was the star of our book club, without a doubt!” Rose began.  “She was the one who got us hooked on Margaret Atwood and A.S. Byatt and P.D. James,” Rose bubbled.  “Heck, we would’ve wasted six whole weeks on Jane Austen if it weren’t for Joey.  She was a sweetie pie, sure, but she was also a firecracker.  Not afraid to kick off her shoes, no ma’am.  You should’ve heard her reading the juicy parts from Jean Auel’s latest!  Lord, she almost made the walls blush.”

    Stranahan thought: My Joey?  (pg. 270)

 “Chaz is slicker than pig snot on a doorknob, or however the saying goes.”  (pg. 52)

    There’s a different environmental theme in each Hiaasen novel, and I was intrigued by the one used here: the runoff from using chemical fertilizers is wreaking havoc on the Everglades flora and fauna due to small, but persistent, amounts of phosphates in them.

    This piqued my interest because the company I work for manufactures chemical fertilizers, and Florida is one of our key markets.  We do not make any phosphate-containing products, however.  And while I don’t question Carl Hiaasen’s research diligence, I am surprised that such a small amount of phosphate (300 parts per billion may sound like a big number, but it’s actually less than ½ part per million) can cause so much damage to the swamp ecosystem.

    But this is mostly just a technical musing on my part.  I don’t really have anything to quibble about in Skinny Dip, so I'm reduced to nitpicking

    8½ Stars.  ANAICT, Skinny Dip is one of Carl Hiaasen’s better-known and highly-regarded novels, and personally I found it to be fully deserving of that reputation.  This was my sixth Carl Hiaasen book (although the first since 2014), and overall I seem to be warming to his style of storytelling.