Product Description

Chaz Perrone might be the only marine scientist in the world who doesn’t know which way the Gulf Stream runs. He might also be the only one who went into biology just to make a killing, and now he’s found a way–doctoring water samples so that a ruthless agribusiness tycoon can continue illegally dumping fertilizer into the endangered Everglades. When Chaz suspects that his wife, Joey, has figured out his scam, he pushes her overboard from a cruise liner into the night-dark Atlantic. Unfortunately for Chaz, his wife doesn’t die in the fall.

Clinging blindly to a bale of Jamaican pot, Joey Perrone is plucked from the ocean by former cop and current loner Mick Stranahan. Instead of rushing to the police and reporting her husband’s crime, Joey decides to stay dead and (with Mick’s help) screw with Chaz until he screws himself.

As Joey haunts and taunts her homicidal husband, as Chaz’s cold-blooded cohorts in pollution grow uneasy about his ineptitude and increasingly erratic behavior, as Mick Stranahan discovers that six failed marriages and years of island solitude haven’t killed the reckless romantic in him, we’re taken on a hilarious, full-throttle, pure Hiaasen ride through the warped politics and mayhem of the human environment, and the human heart.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #355291 in Books
• Published on: 2004-07-13
• Released on: 2004-07-13
• Format: Deckle Edge
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 368 pages

Amazon.com Review
Charles "Chaz" Perrone fancies himself a take-charge kind of guy. So when this "biologist by default" suspects that his curvaceous wife, Joey, has stumbled onto a profitable pollution scam he's running on behalf of Florida agribusiness mogul Red Hammernut, he sets out right away to solve the problem--by heaving Joey off the deck of a luxury cruise liner and into the Atlantic Ocean, far from Key West. But--whoops!--Joey, a former swimming champ, doesn't drown. Instead, as Carl Hiaasen tells in his 10th adult novel, Skinny Dip, she makes her way back to shore, thanks both to a wayward bale of Jamaican marijuana and lonerish ex-cop Mick Stranahan (Skin Tight, 1989), and then launches a bogus blackmail campaign that's guaranteed to drive her lazy, libidinous hubby into a self-protective frenzy.

You've got to hand it to Hiaasen: He's perfected a formula for crisply written, satirical crime fiction that makes the best use of imaginatively repulsive villains, as well as less thoroughly venal scoundrels and victims who ultimately overcome their antagonists, all while stumping for the preservation of Florida's environment, particularly the Everglades. In Skinny Dip, we find Chaz (who'd rather be golfing than puttering around the "hot, buggy, funky-smelling and treacherous" reaches of nature) falsifying water samples to help Hammernut turn the 'Glades into "God’s septic tank." That scheme, though, is endangered not just by Joey's sudden disappearance, but by the suspicions of a python-loving police detective and Chaz's own outstanding inability to tame his Viagra-enhanced tumescence. Even by assigning Chaz a baby-sitter--the hulking, hirsute, and painkiller-addicted Tool--Hammernut can't keep his pet biologist out of trouble. As Joey and Stranahan unfold their revenge plot, and Tool's conscience grows in competition with Chaz's ego, the reader can only marvel at the extent of the train wreck ahead.

As much fun as Hiaasen has delivering Chaz his climactic comeuppance, what's missing from Skinny Dip is a more complex, more credible development of Mick Stranahan's character and the relationship he builds with the much younger Joey Perrone. Like Erin Grant, from Strip Tease, Joey has far more going for her than her bra-cup size; but "hero" Stranahan is of far less interest here than any of his fellow players. --J. Kingston Pierce

From Publishers Weekly
Hiaasen's signature mix of hilariously over-the-top villains, lovable innocents and righteous indignation at what mankind has done to his beloved Florida wilderness is all present in riotous abundance in his latest. It begins with attractive heiress Joey Perrone being tossed overboard from a cruise ship by her larcenous husband, Chaz—not for her money, which she has had the good sense to keep well away from him, but because he fears she is onto his crooked dealings with a ruthless tycoon who is poisoning the Everglades. But instead of drowning as she's supposed to, Joey stays afloat until she is rescued by moody ex-cop Mick Stranahan, a loner who has also struck out in the marriage department. Then the two together, with the unwitting aid of a suspicious cop who can't pin the attempted murder on Chaz, hatch a sadistic plot to scare that "maggot" out of what little wit he has. Even Tool, a hulking brute sent by the tycoon to keep an eye on Chaz, eventually turns against him, and much of the fun is in watching the deplorable Chaz flounder further and further in the murk, both literally and figuratively (Chaz's job, as the world's unlikeliest marine biologist, involves falsifying water pollution levels for the tycoon). Hiaasen's books are so enjoyable it's always a sad moment when they end. In this case, however, sadness is mixed with puzzlement because the book seems to end in mid-scene, with Chaz in trouble again—but is it terminal? We thought at first there were some pages missing, but Knopf says that was the ending Hiaasen intended. Odd.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
Let me start with a confession: This is the first Carl Hiaasen novel that I've read, and so longtime admirers of his work should kindly forgive any oversights in what follows. Rest assured, though, that what does follow will be largely a rave. Normally, I would have tried to dig out one or two earlier Hiaasens before this one (Stormy Weather, Strip Tease, Skin Tight, etc.), but I was far from home and my usual resources: I started the book one evening while staying in a cottage surrounded by estuaries and reclaimed marshland. New Smyrna Beach, Fla., seemed the right place to read Carl Hiaasen, unless I were to drive four hours south on I-95 to Miami. I liked sitting in the gathering dark, a ceiling fan softly rotating overhead, surrounded by scrub oak and palmetto, with the passion fruit starting to ripen and the insects flittering and buzzing outside, as that evening sun went down.

I mention all this because several characters in Hiaasen's book -- the Travis McGee-like hero, Mick Stranahan; the crazed, one-eyed swamp hermit, the Captain; and a couple of others -- have appeared in previous novels. I would like to have known more about their earlier lives, but Hiaasen makes sure that his new story works perfectly well without such knowledge. Still, I'm sure that fans will derive an extra fillip of pleasure in recognizing old friends.

While on a cruise to celebrate their second wedding anniversary, Joey Perrone is pushed overboard one night by her husband, Chaz. "The impact tore off her silk skirt, blouse, panties, wristwatch and sandals, but Joey remained conscious and alert. Of course she did. She had been co-captain of her college swim team, a biographical nugget that her husband obviously had forgotten."

Once Joey surfaces, she starts swimming toward the distant lights of the Florida coast, but after some hours the young woman begins to tire -- Chaz had made her drink a lot of Merlot before the "accident" -- and then . . . "She had momentarily forgotten about the sharks, when something heavy and rough-skinned butted against her left breast. Thrashing and grunting, she beat at the thing with both fists until the last of her strength was gone."

Meanwhile, Chaz Perrone is telling the world how terrible he feels about Joey's disappearance -- it couldn't be suicide, could it? -- and secretly calling up his girlfriend, Ricca, and generally trying to disguise how much he is a cheat and a maggot. But cop Karl Rolvaag, in true Columbo fashion, feels that something isn't quite right here. Chaz is a marine biologist, a wetlands scientist testing for chemical pollution in the Everglades, and yet he doesn't appear to know the direction that the Gulf Stream flows, blithely allows his tropical fish to starve and even mixes his recyclables with the regular garbage. Rolvaag starts to dig into the case.

Joey survives, and her rescuer is none other than Mick Stranahan, 53, former cop, lean, easygoing, six times married (five times to waitresses), living alone on an island with his Doberman, a skiff, some books and a lot of fishing equipment. Shall we just say that he is every woman's dream? Joey, we learn, is 37, blonde, tomboyish, sexy and low-maintenance. In other words, every middle-aged man's fantasy. And she's rich, too. One of the pleasures of Skinny Dip lies in waiting for these two likable people to hook up, even if there is little doubt about it happening.

" 'Mick, I want to pay you for your help. Plus expenses, of course, including room and board.'

" 'I still can't promise I won't try to sleep with you,' he said. 'That's how I often behave when I meet someone attractive. It's only fair that you should know.'

" 'I appreciate the honesty. I do.'

" 'Don't worry, you'll see me coming about a mile away. I'm not real slick.'

" 'No?'

" 'French wine, moonlight and Neil Young, strictly acoustic.' "

After Joey recuperates, she decides that Chaz could beat an attempted murder rap -- her word against his -- and so she decides to stay dead for a while. Instead of going to the police, with Mick's help she sets in motion a plan to drive her priapic scumbag of a husband crazy and to discover why he tried to kill her. Finding the answer will ultimately involve some typical South Florida types: ruthless developer Samuel Johnson Hammernut; a man-mountain named Tool; the sexy Rose, whom no man can resist; Joey's sheep-herder brother, Corbett; Ricca, the mistress-hair stylist; the dogged Karl Rolvaag and his pet pythons; a sharp-tongued, religious cancer patient named Maureen; and, not least, the Captain.

Some crime novels are deadly serious, but Hiaasen belongs to the school of Elmore Leonard and Donald Westlake, preferring a breezy tone, grotesque characters, rampant wish fulfillment and action that remains essentially comic and even sentimental. Skinny Dip follows a traditional caper script, and one never really fears for any of the good guys; one simply waits to see how the baddies will receive their comeuppance. The fate of Chaz Perrone, for instance, could have been written by Evelyn Waugh. Waugh would certainly have admired Hiaasen's ironic wit:

"As Red Hammernut listened to Chaz Perrone's story, he thought of the many blessings that had come his way, but also of the toil. A big farming operation like his was a challenging enterprise, relying as it did on rampant pollution and the systematic mistreatment of immigrant labor. For Red it was no small feat to keep the feds off his back while at the same time soaking taxpayers for lucrative crop subsidies and dirt-cheap loans that might not be repaid this century. He reflected upon the hundreds of thousands of dollars that he'd handed out as campaign donations; the untallied thousands more for straight-up bribes, hookers, private-yacht charters, gambling stakes and other discreet favors; and finally the countless hours of ass-kissing he'd been forced to endure with the same knuckleheaded politicians whose loyalties he'd purchased.

"This was no easy gig. Red Hammernut got infuriated every time he heard some pissy liberal refer to the federal farm bill as corporate welfare. The term implied contented idleness, and nobody worked harder than Red to keep the money flowing. . . . "

Some readers might fault Skinny Dip for a slightly excessive zaniness -- does Joey really need to break into her house again and again? After a while it starts to feel like French farce, with the wronged wife actually hiding under the bed while her husband, suffering sexual difficulties since her "murder," tries to make it with a New Age chick named Medea. Poor Chaz. This Ken-doll sex fiend, this self-deceiving dolt, finds that everything is suddenly spinning out of control, even his handwriting: "He was alarmed to realize that his penmanship, once precise and consistent, had degenerated to the sort of sinuous, pinprick scrawl associated with UFO correspondents and future workplace snipers."

Skinny Dip, like other work by Hiaasen, warns against the depredations the Everglades continues to suffer, and hopes, in part, to provoke readers' ire against venal politicians and unscrupulous businessmen. But since all right-thinking people naturally assume rampant corruption in Florida, as elsewhere, what to actually do is the problem. And so most of us will simply sit back and enjoy Skinny Dip for its caper plot and its pervasive, engaging wit:

"Taking cover behind a magazine, Stranahan attempted to immerse himself in the travails of Eminem, a deep though conflicted young man. Apparently wealth, fame and unlimited sex are nice, but true spiritual happiness must come from within."

Waugh would smile at that sentence too.
Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

Customer Reviews

Hilarious, Satiric Crime Fiction! A Great Summer Read!!
"Skinny Dip" may be the best beach read of the summer! Carl Hiaasen's satire and dark humor do wonders for crime fiction. He turns out the most extraordinarily eccentric characters: the stripper sister-in-law; a quirky environmentalist nephew; the has-been writer neighbor; evil scoundrels who are beyond redemption; Tool, a hulking but kinda lovable brute, who is the villain's heavy; a trashy mistress; and resilient victims who give as good as they get...or better! Set in South Florida, Hiaasen highlights the area's nuttiness and some of the weird folks who inhabit that corner of our country. Not one character could be considered "normal" in this novel, but behind strange facades beat good hearts.

Joey Perrone, the almost-murdered wife of corrupt Charles "Chaz" Perrone, makes it back to shore after her husband tosses her overboard a cruise ship, far off Key West's coast. He must have underestimated Joey's talents. She's a former swim star. And thanks to a floating bale of marijuana and the assistance of Mick Stranahan, a burnt-by-love ex-cop, she doesn't sink. Oh no! Joey lives for pay-back.

Chaz, an incompetent marine biologist, (he doesn't even know which direction the Gulf Stream flows in), has long been on the take from agribusiness tycoon Red Hammernut, (great name!), who's been dumping fertilizer into the endangered Everglades. He thinks that Joey has discovered that he's been exchanging clean-water samples for the actual tainted water that is the result of Hammernut's environmental pollution. But his wife doesn't have a clue about the scam.

The lovely, curvaceous Joey recovers her strength, mental and physical, at the island home of her gallant rescuer Mike, who is the victim of six failed marriages. Instead of going to the police, however, she decides to play dead. She persuades Mike to help her mess with Chaz's mind while she figures out why he tried to kill her.

This is a fast paced, fun, often hilarious read with wonderful characters...and humor galore, if you laugh at dark things and enjoy farce mixed with your suspense. I really enjoyed it.

JANA

Mick Stranahan returns
Carl Hiaasen must surely be a rather demented person. Anyone who can come up with such wacky plots, not to mention the continually offbeat characters that polulate his novels is either a genius, or an idiot savant! His latest tickled my funny bone, as all of his books do. If South Florida is really anything like the place he writes about in his novels, I'm glad I've never spent any time visiting there. Even the throwaway characters are bizarre, as for example the parents of our story's heroine, who (the parents) died in a very unusual airplane crash. We have hairy strongarm men, redneck millionaires out to cheat the government, misplaced Norwegian policemen longing for snow, and a myriad of other folks crawling off the pages of this book. Of course, we welcome the return of Mick Stranahan, who was last seen in "Skin Tight", another of the author's wierd tales. I don't want to discuss the plot, because it is hilarious, but there are two captive pythons in the book, in addition to an elderly female cancer patient who turns a bad man into a somewhat good guy. Just one word of warning: if you go near the South Florida swamps, beware the Captain!!!

AN IRESISTIBLE BLEND OF MIRTH AND MURDER
Carl Hiaasen's tenth foray into an irresistible blend of mirth and murder is emblematic of his previous work (Sick Puppy, Lucky You, Strip Tease, Stormy Weather, Basket Case). In other words, Skinny Dip is a doozy! Satire, suspense and laugh out loud outre characters are this author's forte - lucky for us.

Reminiscent of moonlight over Miami our story opens on a cruise ship. Joey Perrone and her husband of two years, Chaz, are celebrating their anniversary on the Sun Duchess from out of Port Everglades bound for Puerto Rico, Nassau, and a private Bahamian island owned by the cruise ship company. Their voyage had a less than auspicious beginning as it was delayed for three hours because an angry raccoon was loose in the pastry kitchen. Once the varmint was dispatched they were off - and so was Joey.

After filling his wife's wine glass four time at dinner Chaz suggested a romantic stroll on deck. Their walk was short as once by the rail he pretended to drop their stateroom key. Bending over he didn't find the key but Joey's ankles which he grabbed, upending her into the black Atlantic.

As Joey (former champion swimmer at UCLA) fought the waves she thought, "I had a feeling he didn't love me anymore, but this is ridiculous."

Now, this is a girl who comes from sturdy stock. Her parents, Hank and Lana Wheeler, ran a casino resort in Nevada featuring a Russian dancing bear act overseen by "a semi-retired dominatrix who billed herself as Ursa Major." When one of the bears developed an impacted bicuspid the Wheelers offered to fly him to a periodontic veterinarian at Lake Tahoe. Better still they decided to go along with Ursa and the bear - bad choice. The jet crashed with no survivors, leaving Joey with a cool 4 million.

She moved to Florida at that time where she met her first husband, a stockbroker. The pair were happily wed for four years until a sky diver whose parachute didn't open fell on him. Joey is widowed but richer because of the settlement from the sky diving company.

Next came Chaz - this lady is definitely not lucky in love. She has no idea why Chaz would try to do her in. He has one very good idea - he believes she knows that he's doctoring water samples which allows a greedy polluter to go on dumping fertilizer into the Everglades. Since Chaz is an unscrupulous maggot (an understatement) he has no choice but to render Joey speechless. He feels no remorse whatsoever, only satisfaction that is wife is dead.

Problem is she's not. Joey manages to hang onto a floating bale of grass, "Sixty pounds of Jamaica's finest," until she's found by ex policeman Mick Stranahan. Well, there's just so much a woman can take. Joey's happy to be alive, but decides not to let her husband know it. With Stranahan's help she'll play dead and drive Chaz crazy.

We could say, "And this is where the fun begins," but, truth is, in typical Hiaasen style we've had a great deal of fun already. From the opening paragraph to page 355 of "Skinny Dip" laughter abounds. Someone has said "Carl Hiaasen is so good he ought to be illegal." Right on!

- Gail Cooke