Comment

May 07, 2018
This is one of the worst Hiaasen novels. I thought I would try to get into them, because they describe a much grittier world than I am aware of, but this latest one was just too big a challenge for Hiassen to sell me (eco terrorist as protagonist - I am halfway through the book, and I find I despise every single character equally). Well it's pretty clear he approaches these books more as a newspaper reporter than a bonafide author. His characters, or caricatures, kind of go through these wild adventures in an exposition style. But the characters themselves have no arc to speak of. Usually his protagonist is some kind of super man, who is invincible in fights, extremely savvy to all of the social ills surrounding him, and all he wants is peace to retreat away from the noise of the wicked world to the tranquility of his own extreme self-sufficiency. But he is usually besot by naked bimbos throwing themselves on him, or else gangs of evil thugs who feel he has to learn some lesson of respect, for some reason, so he has to rise himself from his figurative easy chair, and reluctantly deal with all these external messes that incidentally were never his fault. Ultimately the book ends, and the main characters are pretty much unchanged, other than a new set of antagonists have been thwarted. I have a sneaking suspicion that his books are nothing more than fantasy trips for Hiaasen, in which naked beautiful women bring him booze and drugs, and he clobbers multiple 'bad guys' with ease, and gives them injuries that would hospitalize them (for example, the two gym rats he beats up with cans of beer, one gets a severely broken jaw, the other suffers some other facial injury - their girlfriends drop everything to tend to their immediate condition, Hiassen escapes with ease. Their crime? Someone chucked a beer can at a pelican; he saw it; and as an eco-terrorist, he is the only one man enough to deal with it - or whatever). Anyway, to read his books you have to stretch out a long ways in order to suspend your disbelief. But most of his characters are so flawed that they no longer seem like a protagonist I have any interest in reading about. And it's not like they undergo any worthwhile transformation either; the book will end with the mobsters dead or in jail, most likely broke, and Hiassen's character sitting pretty with some other guy's wife (or wives), and probably the drugs too. Thanks anyway.