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.

Little Siberia - Antti Tuomainen

 I picked up Palm Beach Finland earlier this year and quite enjoyed it.   So I picked up Little Siberia and found it slightly less enjoyable.   Tuomainen sees himself as a Finnish Hiaissen but he simply hasn't thought it through with this one.

The start is promising.   A meteorite falls to earth on the Finnish border with Russia, smashing through the car roof of an alcoholic ex-rally driver who was aiming to smash into the cliff-face and kill himself.   It turns out to be a meteorite of special interest, its composition unusual.   They say it's worth a million euros.   It will have to be taken to Helsinki, then on to London for further study.   In the meantime it is lodged in the War Museum in Hurmevaara and guarded for the next four days by volunteers from the villagers.

The first night the young pastor is on guard duty when unknown criminal try to steal the meteorite.   Unfortunately they raid the wrong cabinet in the darkness and steal the wrong item, with fatal consequences.

So far, so good, we think.   Cracking premise, nice set-up.   Our protagonist, Joel, is no ordinary pastor.   He is a veteran of the Afghan war in which he was seriously injured.   He has a beautiful, clever wife who he adores.   She tells him she is pregnant.   He should be thrilled - but the pipe bomb he stepped on in Afghanistan left him permanently infertile.   Somehow he hasn't told Krista about his problem - and that's where ther shortcomings of Little Siberia begin.

Joel presents as an honest man.   He doesn't pretend that he believes absolutely in God.   He just wants to use compasssion and his listening skills to help the villagers.  So why would he not tell the wife he adores?   The resolution of this plotline is cursory in the extreme and I didn't believe it for a moment.

Likewise, the cosmic pebble which drops in the stagnant pond that is Hurmevaara is rather mechancially worked out.   A bunch of suspects is put in front of us and eliminated in turn.   A couple of interfering Russian gangsters offer promise but end up going nowhere much.

Little Siberia is pacey but perfunctory.   Worse, it is not as funny as it thinks it us.   I won't be picking up the next Tuomainen I come across.

Palm Beach Finland = Antti Tuomainen

 What do you get when you cross Carl Hiaasen with gloomy old Finland, land of a hell of a lot of water?  Come on, clue's in the title...   Yep, Palm Beach Finland.   It really is as simple as that,

The concept is brutally simple, but the execution is really good.   OK, it's not as funny as the Poet Laureate of Florida in his Nineties heyday, but it's a lot funnier than Hiaasen has been since the Millennium.   The plotting is involved but never ridiculously so, and the characters are all well-drawn and likeable.   Which, given that one of them is a Helsinki hitman, is no mean feat.

The set-up really is that everyone has a dream.   Jorma Lievo has a vision of (like it says in the title) Palm Beach, only in Finland.  The heat is less oppressive, there is no tide for surfing, but otherwise...   Jorma has built it, giving the chalets the names of characters from Miami Vice.   It will take off in time, especially if he can expand.  But expansion is blocked by a ramshackle property which Olivia Koski has just inherited.   Olivia has been away in the big city, with poor-quality men who have drained her financially and emotionally.   Her dream is to restore the family home, starting with the plumbing, which is going to be expensive.  Jorma Lievo, meanwhile, wants her out as cheaply as possible.   The cheapest possible method is to pay two deadbeats on his payroll, Chico and Robin, to conduct a campaign of low-key nuisance.   They start by heaving a brick through Olivia's window.   The brick hits a burglar who comes at the pair with an electric blender.   Struggling, they accidentally break his neck.   The local police get nowhere with their investigation, so Helsinki sends in undercover Jan Nyman.   Meanwhile the hitman, Holma, receives bad news: his half-brother, the sibling he didn't know he had until recently, has been inexplicably murdered in a place inexplicably called Palm Beach Finland.   OK, Antero was a nut-job and a nuisance, but blood is blood...

I enjoyed Palm Beach Finland thoroughly and will happily read anything else by Tuomainen that I come across.   It's not life-changing, nor does it pretend to be.   Honest entertainment, deftly done.