Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
``Hiaasen's latest thriller is his funniest and sharpest novel to date. Set in a south Florida swarming with ripoff artists, crooked cops, nude sunbathers and corrupt politicians, it features a Mafia-connected plastic surgeon with butterfingers, a bitchy Hollywood starlet, a remarkably inept hit man and a pompous TV journalist `nationally famous for getting beaten up on camera,' '' said PW. Author tour. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Mick Stranahan, formerly employed by the Miami prosecutor's office, has had five wives and killed five men, and he is still an unhappy man. Forced into premature retirement for blowing the whistle on a crooked judge, Stranahan seeks disengagement from society and exiles himself to Stiltsville. It isn't long before the outside world intrudes, and he is dragged back into the cesspool of Miami corruption. An old unsolved case involving a young college coed's disappearance after a routine outpatient rhinoplasty in a swank plastic surgery factory comes back to haunt Stranahan and disrupt his self-satisfying ennui. In Hiaasen's world everyone is corrupt, and the world is awash in vanity and greed. Thanks to the author's offbeat sense of humor, however, the story is not unbearably oppressive. Reader George Wilson provides the perfect tone of understated irony. Wilson's characterizations are clever and clearly distinct. Recommended for most libraries with large crime/mystery collections.-- Jack McCleland, Brooklyn P.L. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Black-humored crime-novelist Hiaasen (Tourist Season, 1986; Double Whammy, 1987) tops himself here, exploding sardonic marvels on nearly every page--in an exceptionally inventive tale of a retired Florida cop and his run-ins with the weirdest villains this side of Batman. Former state investigator Mick Stranahan just wants to be left alone to fish and to feed his pet barracuda at his stilt house in Biscayne Bay. But when a Mafia hit-man shows up, Stranahan is forced to skewer him with the nose-sword of his stuffed marlin, and then to leave his hideaway to find out who wants him dead. The culprit: Dr. Rudy Graveline, a rich quack of a plastic surgeon who's trying to cover up his woman-slaughter, during a nose job four years earlier, of a patient--an old case of Stanahan's that's now being dug into, because of a tattling nurse, by Reynaldo Flemm (read Geraldo Rivera) of TV's hardhitting In Your Face. Meanwhile, Graveline sics a new killer on Stranahan: seven-foot-tall Chemo--he of the Rice Krispies complexion, legacy of a botched excision of ingrown nose hairs--who promptly loses his left hand to Stranahan's barracuda, but who ingeniously replaces it with a unique prosthesis, that gardener's delight, a Weed-Whacker. Stalked by Chemo, and now also by two bent cops, Stranahan turns to his shyster brother-in-law for a legal attack on Graveline--with hysterically disastrous results. And then there's the romantic front, as Chemo lumbers into something like love with that chatty nurse, and Stranahan, veteran of five whirlwind marriages, tries not to tall in love with Flemm's TV producer. Meanwhile, Flemm raids Graveline's clinic and dies at the hands of a liposuctioner--but all accounts are squared away when Chemo, assisted by Stranahan, performs a fatal nose job on Graveline. For all the wackiness, Hiaasen never loses control of his rambunctious story or characters, keeping his satire sharply focused and the suspense on full throttle. Great entertainment, Hiaasen's best. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
