http://community.livejournal.com/50bookchallenge/3878331.html (Tourist Season); http://tamaranth.blogspot.com/2006/07/68-double-whammy-carl-hiaasen.html (Double Whammy) ( )

This collection contains three classic Hiaasen lunacies. "Tourist Season", has a madcap crew of reporters, cops, politicians and a hungry crocodile, moving around the Everglades. In "Double Whammy", investigator R.J. Decker is hired to investigate cheating in Florida, while "Skin Tight", takes readers into the world of plastic surgery.

In Tourist Season, a series of bizarre murders leads to a madman attempting to reclaim Florida from the ravages of developers and other ills of modernization. Hiassen has delivered an engaging mystery using satire to expose the greed, shallowness and environmental degradation of Florida by developers. Here a convention-goer, a retired widow, a chamber of commerce leader, and a beauty queen fall victim to a mysterious terrorist group. The viewpoints shift skillfully from the individual victims to the terrorists (a rogue columnist, a radical Cuban, a disillusioned black ex-football hero, and a Florida Indian) and to the private eye trying to prevent the final outrage. The pace is headlong from one murder to the next with plenty of odd happenings to keep the reader entertained.

In "Double Whammy", Hiaasen matches up a pair of unlikely targets: professional bass fishing and TV evangelism. R.J. Decker is the `hero", but true to the author's anything-but-conventional approach to fiction, this hero is an ex-con with a hair-trigger temper who lives in a trailer park. But compared to the road kill-eating hermit, "Skink", Decker is a rock of sanity and normalcy. Add to this an assorted cast of oily Florida bass-fishing millionaires, a corrupt Jimmy Swaggart-like TV preacher, a pair of Florida redneck murderous brothers, and the pro-bass fishing tournament crowd all slogging through black-water swamps and drainage ditches. Bodies pile up, but typical of Hiaasen fair, even as the creative brutality of the murders accelerates, the reader is more likely to chuckle than cringe.

In Skin Tight, Hiassen gives us his usual cast of interesting and very peculiar players drawn from the mix of modern day Miami. Without giving any of the plot away there are two things about this book that will stay with any reader: the fate that befalls the vain and insufferable TV host in his Geraldo-like quest at expose; and the character Chemo's choice of a prosthesis - a weed-whacker. These are a couple of the over-the-top high points in Skin Tight, one of Hiaseen's grizzliest and funniest tales.

Hiaasen peoples his novels with the oddest, most interesting characters imaginable. Then he throws them into almost-ridiculous situations. The result is a wild ride of laughs and raised eyebrows and unforeseeable turns. Absolute absurdity simply becomes the milieu in which the least likely characters commit the most unreasonable acts, and you watch the parade with suspended logic. ( )