Nature Girl by Carl Hiaasen

 

Yeah, my affection for Hiaasen is reasonably well-documented, and this book goes to show (at least mostly) that even when he was maybe not at his peak he could still write hilarious novels. The story here is probably a bit on the scattershot side, maybe even jumbled, but it at least mostly holds together by something like force of will; the characters are varyingly goofy, there are people with good hearts and cracked brains, and there are people with empty hearts and dull brains, and there's at least one person who's deranged to the point of being like mindlessly evil, and they mostly get what they deserve (except perhaps for one character who's going to be looking into getting a real estate license in Florida, and even he has had to thoroughly re-examine his choices and his goals). The prose sparkles, there are laugh-out-loud moments throughout, and Hiaasen's gift for making wildly insane dialogue sound plausible and almost reasonable is on nearly constant display. The fact Hiaasen loves Florida in spite of itself (or at least in spite of its people) is all over this novel, maybe more than some of his more recent ones.