Squeeze Me - Carl Hiaasen

 Nobody does these things better than Carl Hiaasen.   Admittedly, his field is somewhat niche - comic capers, Florida-based, hopeless criminals, offbeat investigators, a recurring eco-warrior who was once the state governor - but, now more than ever, someone's got to do it.

It could be argued that history has come to Hiassen.   You land a corrupt populist President in his actual backyard representing everything Hiassen has always railled so vehemently against ...   Squeeze Me (2020) is Hiassen's first term take; I gather he has just released another for the second.   This way, I suppose, something good arises from all the chaos and graft.

Squeeze Me is very good.   It all starts routinely for Hiassen: an elderly and very wealthy widow gets eaten by a giant snake at a high-end Charity Ball.   Wildlife removal expert Angie Armstrong is called in to assist with the cover up.   Angie is somewhat hardass when it comes to wildlife.   She served time for feeding a deer poacher's hand to a grateful alligator.   She's willing to euthanise the snake but insists on delivering it, as required by law, to the state laboratory.   Those organising the cover-up, however, worry sbout the telltale bulge in the snake's gut.   So they hire two deadbeats to deal with the problem.

The deadbeats inevitably celebrate partial success with a wild night at a downtown titty bar.   Thus the headless snake, complete with bulge, finds its way to the middle of a road which brings the First Lady's motorcade to a halt.   This brings in the Feds and the Secret Service.   It also inspires the First Lady's perma-tanned husband to a new crusade.   Kki Pew Fitzsimmons was a member of the President's Palm Beach fanclub (known as the Potussies, which is at least preferable to their first choice of name) who have raised millions for him.

Obviously, when Hiassen alludes to the President and First Lady, he does not mean D J Trump and the lovely Melania.   The entirely fictional characters in Squeeze Me are referred to only by their Secret Service handles, Mastadon and Mockingbird.   Thus Mockingbird is free to have a hot affair with her personal CIA bodyguard while Mastadon gets hot and not especially heavy with a compliant pole dancer of his acquaintance.   Likewise, the estate where Mastadon and Mockingbird live is in no way to be confused with Mar-a-Lago.   It can't be because Case Belicosa is gross and tacky.

The disappearance storyline concludes about halfway through, which struck me as odd.   The real story is the snakes, which leads us to our ongoing hero Skink and his involvement with the madcap chaos at the Annual Gala Ball at Casa Belicosa.   Which is enormous fun.

I've been reading Hiassen for something like thirty years.   I've even read his collaborations with William Montalbano.   I can therefore state with authority: HIASSEN NEVER FAILS TO DELIVER.

Perversion of Justice - Julie K Brown

 What a fantastic book this is!   The Jeffrey Epstein story, told by an investigative reporter from the Miami Herald, filled with the detail we are not allowed in the UK in case it damages our esteem for Prince Andrew.

The scandal about Epstein is the virtual free ride he got from prosecutors in 2008 when he pleaded guilty to one chatge of sex with a minor and thus officially became a paedophile.   This was a plea deal worked out over several years between local prosecutors in Florida and Epstein's star-studded defence team (which actually included Kenneth Starr, the special prosecutor in the Clinton impeachment).  And it stank.   Epstein was given a cursory prison sentence, most of which he served on community control; while technically incarcerated he was allowed out every day to visit his 'office' where in fact his supervisors turned a collective blind eye while he was in turn visited by teenaged blondes.   Later, he was supposed to follow reporting rules for sex offenders as he jetted about the US but never actually did.

This is the scandal which initially drew Julie K Brown to the case.   Over coming years she prepared a series of articles about the case which ultimately drew the attention of New York prosecutors who charged him with a proper list of offences and successfully opposed bail.   Then we have the suspicious death and the secondary Ghislaine Maxwell, which was ongoing as Brown's book went to press.   I hope there is a follow-up in which Brown gives us her view on why Maxwell remains silent even after conviction and a sentence which could see her spend the rest of her life in prison.   In other words, how high does this highly organised sex-ring for the super-rich actually go?   Already, in this book, Brown does not shy away from telling us who the victims implicate in their depositions.   There is at least one high-profile name here I didn't realise was involved.

The best thing about the book, though, is the writing: American journalese at its finest, crisp, conscise, yet bordering on the poetic in the forensic choice of words.   Julie Brown may have learnt her trade the hard way but she learned it well.   A fine book by a fine writer on a hugely important matter.   I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Razor Girl - Carl Hiaasen

It's been a while - five years, unbelievably - since I last read a Hiassen. That was Bad Monkey. This is Razor Girl. The hero is the same, Andrew Yancy, busted ex-cop turned roach inspector, but other than that, all is new.


The razor girl is Merry Mansfield, who specialises in tail-ending other vehicles while she's purportedly shaving her pubic hair. She and Yancy team up to solve the case of the missing reality TV redneck, Buck Nance, who has gone AWOL after an ill-judged homophobic/racist rant in the wrong bar in the wrong part of Florida.


Along the way we and they encounter Mafioso 'Big Noogie' Aeola, replacement beach specialist Marty Trebeaux, class action lawyer Brock Richardson and his fiancée Deb, Buck's biggest fan 'Blister' Krill and a pair of giant Gambian pouch rats. So it's all business as usual, brilliantly plotted and laugh-out loud funny. Pure Hiaassen on top form.

Bad Monkey - Carl Hiaasen

The brand new caper from the king of comedy crime.  Recent Hiaasen's might have fallen slightly short but not this. Busted from detective to roach inspector after having sodomised his girlfriend's husband with a dustbuster, Yancey sets out to solve the mystery of the left arm which turns up where it shouldn't be.  What can go wrong?

One of Hiaasen's recent shortcomings has been recycling old characters.  The governor gone renegade was great fun but surfaced once too often for my liking.  These, so far as I am aware, are all new characters, thus fresh and engaging.  You even empathise with a low-rent thug like Egg after the titular monkey has set about him.

In fact, that's my one criticism.  Not enough monkey and not enough monkey being really, really bad.