“Two honeymooners wake up
early, make love twice, and brace themselves for a spectacle they won't be
watching from the sidelines. A seductive con artist stumbles into a scam that
promises more cool cash than the lottery. A shotgun-toting mobile home salesman
is about to close a deal with disaster. A law school dropout will be chasing
one Gaboon viper, a troop of storm-shocked monkeys, and a newfound love life,
while tourists by the thousands bail from the Florida Keys. We're now entering
the hurricane zone, where hell and hilarity rule.”
As a columnist for the Miami
Herald, once again Hiaasen used his knowledge of reporting on the storm to
highlight the chaotic aftermath of Hurricane Andrew in South Florida
for this novel. (It’s never named, the storm, by the way, but this book was
released in 1995. The the storm happened in 1992, and features an unnamed
Republican president that is probably George Bush, Sr.) It seems the aftermath
of Hurricane turned out to be fertile ground for real-life corruption and
incompetence in the construction industry and local and state governments.
Hiaasen wrote several scathing columns about it, where he derided the
industry's and government's apologists for describing Andrew as "the storm
of the century," which seemed designed to excuse them from their own
ineptitude by exaggerating the force of the hurricane.
As for the novel, it’s features (what I’ve learned only in reading handful of his titles) Hiaasen's usual formula: a confused female victim of the greedy jerk rescued by the "crazy" recluse and the caring, law-enforcement hero, along with some preachiness on greed, environmental protection, with a despicable villain (of which they’re many) named Snapper. It’s a good theme, I guess, and it’s clear only liberals will enjoy the tale. I mean none of the characters are without fault; all appear very easily swayed in breaking the law for a large payoff. Yeah, at times it was hard to care for any of them, even if most of them were cartoonish in nature. It also features the third appearance of Skink, AKA, former Governor Clinton Tyree, and Jim Tile, who both previously appeared in Double Whammy and Native Tongue.
Still, despite being a bit overlong, Hiaasen is a very clever writer with a twisted and dark sense of humor. In Stormy Weather, it almost works, because as you read, you take in the satire and how all the plot threads come somewhat together, but the author had an ax to grind and he takes no prisoners when pointing out corruption that seems live within the mud of Florida.
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