Product Description

JoLayne Lucks lives in a town infamous for its suspicious miracles, but she's still elated when her lottery numbers finally pay off big-$28 million, to be exact. And she has great plans for her fortune: to save a rare piece of Florida paradise from the bulldozers. Only one problem: There's another winning Lotto ticket, and the people who've got it just never learned how to share. When the two militia wannabes swipe JoLayne's ticket, she enlists an off-the-rails newspaperman to help her track down the trigger-happy creeps and their bewildered hostage, a Hooters waitress. Getting rich quick is never easy......

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #125689 in Books
• Published on: 2005-02-01
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 464 pages

From Library Journal
JoLayne Lucks has one of two winning lottery tickets each worth a cool $14 million. She plans to spend it rescuing a local plot of swampland from a strip mall developer. The holders of the other winning ticket, however, are Bode Gazzer and his sidekick, Chubb, who want the whole $28 million. Afire with paramilitary fervor, Bode and Chubb need the cash to bankroll the start-up of the White Clarion Aryans before NATO takes over America with a handicapped parking sticker scam. They steal JoLayne's ticket, but before they can cash it she mounts a hot pursuit with the help of local journalist Tom Krome. As they chase Bode and Chubb through the swamps and sleazy dives, dodging bullets and local religious fanatics, Tom and JoLayne leave a wake of mayhem and hilarity. This is Hiaasen (Naked Came the Manatee, LJ 1/97) at his wacky best?a steamy amalgam of raunch, righteousness, and riotous laughs. Highly recommended.
-?Susan Gene Clifford, Aerospace Corp., El Segundo, Cal.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Entertainment Weekly, Tom De Haven
Everything from survivalist folly to religious fanaticism is lampooned with gusto; so are marriage, divorce, race relations, and Hooters restaurants. The sledgehammer wackiness never flags, but Lucky You is finally fatiguing. It's too obvious, too long, too smart-alecky, and way too desperate to please.

The New York Times Book Review, Charles Salzberg
Hiaasen writes witty dialogue that crackles, and his characters are eccentrically colorful. For the most part, he is able to keep all his balls in the air, though occasionally one drops and the plot flags.... But never mind. The trip is entertaining and worrisome enough to make you think twice before making that next trip down to Florida.

Customer Reviews

Wacky, Entertaining
Characters with issues, that's what makes the folks that populate this novel intriguing--because they may just be the very people you walk passed in the street, you never know...

Screwballish, nutty. Anyway, it's entertaining in a disturbing way.

Not My Favorite
After reading a few other Hiaasen novels I must rate this as my least favorite. It's readable but I prefer Overboard and Tourist Season.

Hilarious!
Grange, Florida is a small, out-of-the-way community known for its religious miracles, from the weeping Madonna to the stigmata man with holes in his palms that do not heal. Not to mention the road stain in the form of Jesus and the woman who visits every day in her wedding dress. And now, one of their own, JoLayne Lucks, has won one-half of the state's lottery of $28 million. JoLayne works part-time as a veterinarian's assistant and plans to use her lottery winnings to buy and maintain wooded acreage in danger of being developed into a shopping mall.

The other half of the lottery winnings belong to Bode Grazzer, a short man convinced NATO forces are lining up in the Bahamas ready to invade America, and his sidekick Chub, a paint-sniffing mercenary wannabe. Chub and Bode, needing money to begin their own supremacist organization so they can defend the white man when America is invaded, decide to steal the other lottery ticket. They break into JoLayne's home, beat her up and take off with the ticket. On the way to the lottery office, they recruit a convenience store clerk known for his lack of cognitive abilities and take hostage a Hooters waitress Chub has fallen in love with.

To JoLayne's aid comes Tom Krome, an embittered former investigative reporter now working for a small newspaper covering social events. Tom's editor sends him to Grange to write a story about the lottery winner, but before he even pulls out his notepad, Tom finds himself in cahoots with JoLayne and hot on the trail of Bode and Chub. All six end up on a small island in Florida Bay, where a confrontation develops over the two lottery tickets and where two will remain behind forever.

Carl Hiaasen is a master at developing wacky characters and zany plots and dialogue that will leave the reader in stitches throughout the entire book. This is a book all readers will enjoy as they follow the madcap antics of these screwball characters.