Stormy Weather

July 29, 1996
Hiaasen's latest seriocomic Florida thriller spent seven weeks on PW's bestseller list.

April 15, 1995
Apres Strip Tease (LJ 8/93), le deluge. Hiaasen returns to familiar ground-southern Florida-in this account of the schemers who spring up in the aftermath of a devastating hurricane.

July 1, 1995
If you share Carl Hiaasen's view of southern Florida as a "culture in terminal moral hemorrhage," then it's hard not to see a hurricane as a form of biblical revenge--nature taking a little of its own back from the neon jungle. The problem, however, as Hiaasen shows us in his latest novel, set in the days immediately following Hurricane Andrew, is that Florida's mutant forms of human sleaze have the survival instincts of cockroaches. Like carpetbaggers descending on the post^-Civil War South, the con artists, looters, and thrill seekers who emerge in Andrew's aftermath bring a new and virulent form of pestilence to an already ravaged landscape. Hiaasen follows the activities of a typically bizarre group of hurricane scammers: a can-do girl who, frustrated in her attempts to sleep with a Kennedy, hopes to perpetrate an insurance scam; her deformed, ex-con partner, the archetypal loose cannon; a Madison Avenue advertising executive intent on videotaping the carnage to amuse the guys back at the office; and a crooked building examiner who approved many of the substandard houses that Andrew summarily blew away. Swirling around this dangerous though hysterically inept bunch is the enigmatic Skink, ex-governor turned hermit and avenging angel. Committed to a radical "pest control" plan, Skink, who has surfaced in previous Hiaasen adventures, drives the action with a deranged yet altruistic frenzy. Combining slapstick nightmare, black comedy, and moral outrage in just the right proportions, Hiaasen's surrealistic vision of Florida on the brink of Armageddon bears comparison to Nathanael West's Hollywood and Malcolm Lowry's Mexico. ((Reviewed July 1995))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1995, American Library Association.)