Helped by having real-life scumbags in his native Florida to draw from, Hiaasen delivers another well-crafted and highly amusing caper, placing crooked land developers, the Mafia, corrupt cops, animal liberationists in the setting of a dumb theme park full of furry animals with stupid names. The result is a coruscating blend of mirth and mayhem.

In this masterly and highly entertaining novel, Lorimer Black finds himself facing an implacable yet amorphous opponent who is always a step ahead of him. It transpires that everyone else is mixed up in a web of corruption with him as the scapegoat. With everybody out for a piece of his hide, Black remains outwardly calm while his psyche threatens to collapse under the strain.

With his typical pace and humour, Hiaasen takes on a broad range of targets, from the vacuous and vain rich with their penchant for cosmetic surgery, politicians whose only focus is the misuse of power in search of money, and greedy land developers. In true Hiaasen style, a loner appears and ultimately, wipes most off them out in a variety of satisfyingly bizarre ways.

Politicians come off distinctly second best in this gritty but amusing tale of the misuse of power in modern-day Britain. As the men in government pursue their criminal agendas, a few of the oppressed masses refuse to truckle under and fight back with rat cunning combined with blunt violence, ultimately revealing the upper echelons as worthless parasites.

Tom Sharpe returned for another swipe at the brutish apartheid regime and this time broadened his field of fire to include the useless and anachronistic remnants of British colonial society. Once again, though, his main targets are the inept and narrow-minded forces of law and order and their political overlords whose inhumane and alienated world Sharpe skewers straight through the eyeball.