Pun Salad

Carl Hiaasen's first adult novel since 2006's Nature Girl. It's his usual funny mishmash of Florida lowlifes, perverts, nutjobs, and criminals, seasoned with one or two essentially decent folk. Some might say he's settled into a formula, and—well, yes he has. But it's a formula he executes pretty flawlessly. Nevertheless, I decided to save a few bucks on a gently-used hardcover at Amazon instead of buying new.

The book revolves around celebrity culture, focusing on Ms. Cherry Pye (previously Cheryl Bunterman) a huge star with minimal talent, but a prodigious appetite for indiscriminate sexual encounters and ubiquitous ingestion of non-nutritive substances. She is pursued by paparazzi, most notably Bang Abbott, whose previous claim to fame was getting a Pulitzer for photographing a shark attack against a hapless tourist. (The scurrilous rumor that Abbott had been scattering chum in the waters just before? Absolutely true.)

Cherry Pye's parents are concerned about their daughter, but almost all of their concern centers around the decline in the revenue stream if the truth about either (a) her sordid activities or (b) her total lack of talent becomes known. To this end, they hire a double, Ann DeLusia, to show up when Cherry's too wasted. (She's pretty much the only sane, decent major character.)

They also engage a bodyguard, known as Chemo, to protect Cherry from the public. And vice-versa. (Chemo is a returning villain from a previous book, where his arm was bitten off by a barracuda and replaced with a commercial-quality weed-whacker. Nice to see him back again; his luck is better here.)

Anyway: Ann is abducted, first by Skink, an ex-governor of Florida turned reclusive environmental guerilla. Then by Bang Abbot, who holds her hostage in order to arrange for an exclusive photo session with Cherry. And then things get really weird.

Hiaasen gets in his usual bashing of everything he sees as wrecking his beloved Florida: tourists, real-estate speculators, conservatives, etc. At some points it feels like he might have been padding to get up to a contractually-agreed page count. But that's OK.