Books: Nature Girl By Carl Hiaasen (2006)

 

"Honey Santana—impassioned, willful, possibly bipolar, self-proclaimed ‘queen of lost causes’—has a scheme to help rid the world of irresponsibility, indifference, and dinnertime sales calls. She’s taking rude, gullible Relentless, Inc., telemarketer Boyd Shreave and his less-than-enthusiastic mistress, Eugenie—the fifteen-minute-famous girlfriend of a tabloid murderer—into the wilderness of Florida’s Ten Thousand Islands for a gentle lesson in civility. What she doesn’t know is that she’s being followed by her Honey-obsessed former employer, Piejack (whose mismatched fingers are proof that sexual harassment in the workplace is a bad idea). And he doesn’t know he’s being followed by Honey’s still-smitten former drug-running ex-husband, Perry, and their wise-and-protective-way-beyond-his-years twelve-year-old-son, Fry. And when they all pull up on Dismal Key, they don’t know they’re intruding on Sammy Tigertail, a half white–half Seminole failed alligator wrestler, trying like hell to be a hermit despite the Florida State coed who’s dying to be his hostage"

This is my first Carl Hiaasen book and his fifteen solo novel (after writing three mysteries with fellow journalist William Montalbano) overall. I knew Hiaasen did mostly humorous crime thrillers and mysteries, I knew he made fun of Florida and the weird people that populate the state, I know he’s an environmentalist and a unabashed liberal, but Nature Girl appears to be something different. It’s funny; it does contain elements of native history (a character that apparently appeared in his first solo novel, Tourist Season), but it's not what I expected. I think it’s more a parody, than laugh out loud funny thriller, but it does have a grotesque villain and good, but sometimes bad hero. So it is more light comedic fiction, I guess, versus what I’ve always read about his books dark themes (apparently, what I’ve read, his books follow a very basic structure, much like Richard Stark’s Parker series). So there is some violence -though, some of it surprising, if I may be honest. It’s not a bad book and probably won’t prevent me from reading his other books (I’ll find some of earlier titles and see where we go from there), but ultimately Nature Girl is bit too long and a bit uninteresting.