Skinny Dip » (Reprint)

In his thrilling and hilarious mysteries, Carl Hiaasen does for the Florida Coast what Raymond Chandler did for L.A., embracing it in all its steamy surrealness, and elevating it to a kind of iconographic literary landscape.

Chaz Perrone might be the only marine scientist in the world who doesn’t know which way the Gulf Stream runs. He might also be the only one who went into biology just to make a killing, and now he’s found a way–doctoring water samples so that a ruthless agribusiness tycoon can continue illegally dumping fertilizer into the endangered Everglades. When Chaz suspects that his wife, Joey, has figured out his scam, he pushes her overboard from a cruise liner into the night-dark Atlantic. Unfortunately for Chaz, his wife doesn’t die in the fall.

Clinging blindly to a bale of Jamaican pot, Joey Perrone is plucked from the ocean by former cop and current loner Mick Stranahan. Instead of rushing to the police and reporting her husband’s crime, Joey decides to stay dead and (with Mick’s help) screw with Chaz until he screws himself.

As Joey haunts and taunts her homicidal husband, as Chaz’s cold-blooded cohorts in pollution grow uneasy about his ineptitude and increasingly erratic behavior, as Mick Stranahan discovers that six failed marriages and years of island solitude haven’t killed the reckless romantic in him, we’re taken on a hilarious, full-throttle, pure Hiaasen ride through the warped politics and mayhem of the human environment, and the human heart.


From the Hardcover edition.

The Washington Post - Michael Dirda

Some crime novels are deadly serious, but Hiaasen belongs to the school of Elmore Leonard and Donald Westlake, preferring a breezy tone, grotesque characters, rampant wish fulfillment and action that remains essentially comic and even sentimental. Skinny Dip follows a traditional caper script, and one never really fears for any of the good guys; one simply waits to see how the baddies will receive their comeuppance. The fate of Chaz Perrone, for instance, could have been written by Evelyn Waugh. Waugh would certainly have admired Hiaasen's ironic wit.