A Guide to Carl Hiaasen Books

When the precious clue-tongued mango voles at the Amazing Kingdom of Thrills on North Key Largo are stolen by heartless, ruthless thugs, Joe Winder wants to uncover why, and find the voles. Joe is lately a PR man for the Amazing Kingdom theme park, but now that the voles are gone, Winder is dragged along in their wake through a series of weird and lethal events that begin with the sleazy real estate agent/villain Francis X. Kingsbury and can end only one way …

At the height of Palm Beach’s charity ball season, Kiki Pew Fitzsimmons, a prominent member of geriatric high society, suddenly vanishes during a swank gala. Kiki Pew was a founding member of the Potussies, a group of women dedicated to supporting the President, who spends half the year at the “Winter White House” just down the road. Meanwhile, Angie Armstrong, wildlife wrangler extraordinaire, is called to the island to deal with a monster-sized Burmese python that has taken residence in a tree. But the President is focused on the disappearance of Kiki Pew. Never one to miss an opportunity to play to his base, he immediately declares her a victim of rampaging immigrant hordes. This, it turns out, is far from the truth, which now lies in the middle of the road, where a bizarre discovery brings the First Lady’s motorcade to a grinding halt.

Passionate and willful Honey Santana is taking rude, gullible telemarketer Boyd Shreave and his less than enthusiastic mistress, Eugenie Fonda, into the mangroves of Florida’s Ten Thousand Islands for a gentle lesson in humility. What Honey doesn’t know is that she’s being followed by her obsessed former employer, Piejack, and her still-smitten ex-husband, Perry, with their protective and wise-beyond-his-years twelve-year-old son, Fry. And when they all arrive on Dismal Key, they don’t know the island is occupied by Sammy Tigertail, a failed alligator wrestler trying like hell to be left alone despite the Florida State coed clinging to his side. South Florida has never been quite so hilarious as it is in this outrageous tale of one woman’s single-handed quest to eradicate greed and enforce civility in her corner of the Sunshine State.

When a ferocious hurricane rips through southern Florida, insurance fraudsters, amateur occultists, and ex-cons waste no time in swarming over the disaster area. And caught in the middle are Max and Bonnie Lamb, honeymooners who abandon their Disney World plans to witness the terrible devastation. But when Max vanishes, Bonnie, aided by a mysterious young man with a tranquilizer gun and a roomful of human skulls, has to follow her only clue: A runaway monkey.

R. J. Decker, star tenant of the local trailer park and neophyte private eye, is fishing for a killer. Thanks to a sportsman’s scam that’s anything but sportsmanlike, there’s a body floating in Coon Bog, Florida – and a lot that’s rotten in the murky waters of big-stakes, large-mouth bass tournaments. Here Decker will team up with a half-blind, half-mad hermit with an appetite for road kill; dare to kiss his ex-wife while she’s in bed with her new husband; and face deadly TV evangelists, dangerously seductive women, and a pistol-toting redneck with a pit bull on his arm. And here his own life becomes part of the stakes. For while the “double whammy” is the lure, first prize is for the most ingenious murder.

Only in America could an innocent, if drunken, guest of honor at a strip joint bachelor party become a mortal threat against Big Money and Big Government. Only in south Florida, land of roadside honky-tonks and sinister pleasure boats — not to mention blackmail and murder — would a virtuous topless dancer join forces with a cool but clueless cop. And only in the fiction of Carl Hiaasen do readers experience riveting suspense and razor-sharp characters along with the most wicked humor imaginable.

“This commencement address will never be given, because graduation speakers are supposed to offer encouragement and inspiration. That’s not what you need. You need a warning.” So begins Carl Hiaasen’s attempt to prepare young men and women for their future. Following the format of Anna Quindlen’s commencement address (Being Perfect) and George Saunders’s commencement address (Congratulations, by the way), the collaboration of Hiaasen and illustrator Roz Chast might look typical from the outside, but inside it is anything but.

Merry Mansfield, the eponymous Razor Girl, specializes in kidnapping for the mob. Her preferred method is rear-ending her targets and asking them for a ride. Her latest mark is Martin Trebeaux, owner of a private beach renourishment company who has delivered substandard sand to a mob hotel. But there’s just one problem: Razor Girl hits the wrong guy. Instead, she ends up with Lane Coolman, talent manager for Buck Nance, the star of a reality TV show about a family of Cajun rooster farmers. Buck Nance, left to perform standup at a Key West bar without his handler, makes enough off-color jokes to incite a brawl, then flees for his life and vanishes.

The first sign of trouble is a Shriner’s fez washed up on a Miami beach. The next is a suitcase containing the almost-legless body of the local chamber of commerce president found floating in a canal … The locals are desperate to keep the murders under wraps and the tourist money flowing. But it will take a reporter-turned–private eye to make sense of a caper that mixes football players, politicians, and one very hungry crocodile in this classic mystery that GQ called “one of the top ten destination reads of all time.”

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.

If you think the wildest, wackiest stories that Carl Hiaasen can tell have all made it into his hilarious, bestselling novels, think again. Dance of the Reptiles collects the best of Hiaasen’s Miami Herald columns, which lay bare the stories — large and small — that demonstrate anew that truth is far stranger than fiction. Hiaasen offers his commentary — indignant, disbelieving, sometimes righteously angry, and frequently hilarious — on issues like the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, Bernie Madoff’s trial, and the shenanigans of the recent presidential elections. Whether or not you have read Carl Hiaasen before, you are in for a wild ride.

Jack Tagger’s years in exile at the obituaries desk of a South Florida daily haven’t dulled his investigative reporter’s nose for a good story. When Jimmy Stoma, the infamous front man of Jimmy and the Slut Puppies, dies in a fishy scuba accident, Jack sees his ticket back to page one — if only he can figure out what really happened. Standing in his way are, just for starters, his ambitious young editor, who hasn’t yet fired anyone but plans to “break her cherry” on Jack; the rock star’s pop-singer widow, who’s using the occasion of her husband’s death to relaunch her own career; and the soulless, profit-hungry owner of the newspaper, whom Jack once publicly humiliated at a stockholders’ meeting. Following clues from the late rock singer’s own music, Jack tries to unravel the lies surrounding Jimmy Stoma’s strange fate.

Andrew Yancy — formerly of the Miami Police and soon-to-be-formally of the Monroe County sheriff’s office — has a human arm in his freezer. There’s a logical explanation for that, but not for how and why it parted from its shadowy owner. Yancy thinks the boating-accident/shark-luncheon explanation is full of holes, and if he can prove murder, the sheriff might rescue him from his grisly Health Inspector gig. But first, Yancy must negotiate an obstacle course of wildly unpredictable events with a crew of even more wildly unpredictable characters, including his just-ex lover, a hot-blooded fugitive from Kansas; the twitchy widow of the frozen arm; two avariciously optimistic real estate speculators; the Bahamian voodoo witch known as the Dragon Queen, whose suitors are blinded by her peculiar charms; Yancy’s new true love, a kinky coroner; and the eponymous bad monkey. Now an Apple Original series from Ted Lasso Executive Producer Bill Lawrence and starring Vince Vaughn.

Bestselling author Carl Hiaasen wisely quit golfing in 1973. But some ambitions refuse to die, and as the years passed and the memories of slices and hooks faded, it dawned on Carl that there might be one thing in life he could do better in middle age than he could as a youth. So gradually he ventured back to the rolling, frustrating green hills of the golf course, where he ultimately — and foolishly — agreed to compete in a country-club tournament against players who can actually hit the ball.

Meet 22-year-old Cherry Pye (née Cheryl Bunterman), a pop star since she was 14, and about to attempt a comeback from her latest drug-and-alcohol disaster. Now meet Cherry again: In the person of her “undercover stunt double,” Ann DeLusia. Ann portrays Cherry whenever the singer is too “indisposed” — meaning wasted — to go out in public. And it is Ann-mistaken-for-Cherry who is kidnapped from a South Beach hotel by obsessed paparazzo Bang Abbott. Now the challenge for Cherry’s handlers (über–stage mother; horndog record producer; nipped, tucked, and Botoxed twin publicists; weed whacker–wielding bodyguard) is to rescue Ann while keeping her existence a secret from Cherry’s public — and from Cherry herself. The situation is more complicated than they know. Ann has had a bewitching encounter with Skink — the unhinged former governor of Florida living wild in a mangrove swamp — and now he’s heading for Miami to find her …

After dispatching a pistol-packing intruder from his home with the help of a stuffed Marlin head, Mick Stranahan can’t deny that someone is out to get him. His now-deceased intruder carries no I.D., and as a former Florida state investigator, Stranahan knows there are plenty of potential culprits. His long list of enemies includes an off point hit man, a personal injury lawyer of billboard fame, a notoriously irritating TV journalist, and a fumbling plastic surgeon. Now, if he wants to keep fishing into his golden years, Stranahan has no choice but to come out of retirement to close this one last case …

Valdez Jones VIII calls himself Wrecker because his great-great-great-great-great-grandfather salvaged shipwrecks for a living. So is it destiny, irony, or just bad luck when Wrecker comes across a speedboat that has run hard aground on a sand flat? The men in the boat don’t want Wrecker to call for help — in fact, they’ll pay him to forget he ever saw them. Wrecker would be happy to forget, but he keeps seeing these men all over Key West — at the marina, in the cemetery, even right outside his own door. And now they want more than his silence — they want a lookout. He’ll have to dive deep into their shady dealings to figure out a way to escape this tangled net …

Noah’s dad is sure that the owner of the Coral Queen casino boat is flushing raw sewage into the harbor – which has made taking a dip at the local beach like swimming in a toilet. He can’t prove it though, and so he decides that sinking the boat will make an effective statement. The boat is pumped out and back in business within days and Noah’s dad is stuck in the clink. Now Noah is determined to prove that the Coral Queen is dumping illegally … somehow. His allies may not add up to much – his sister Abbey, an unreformed childhood biter; Lice Peeking, a greedy sot with poor hygiene; Shelly, a bartender and a woman scorned; and a mysterious pirate – but Noah’s got a plan to flush this crook out into the open. A plan that should sink the crooked little casino, once and for all.

When Wahoo Cray’s dad — a professional animal wrangler — takes a job with a reality TV show called Expedition Survival!, Wahoo figures he’ll have to do a bit of wrangling himself to keep his father from killing Derek Badger, the show’s inept and egotistical star. But the job keeps getting more complicated: Derek Badger insists on using wild animals for his stunts; and Wahoo’s acquired a shadow named Tuna — a girl who’s sporting a shiner courtesy of her father and needs a place to hide out. They’ve only been on location in the Everglades for a day before Derek gets bitten by a bat and goes missing in a storm. Search parties head out and promptly get lost themselves. And then Tuna’s dad shows up with a gun! It’s anyone’s guess who will actually survive Expedition Survival! …

Some facts about Billy Dickens: He saw a biker swerve across the road to run over a snake. Later, the motorcycle ended up at the bottom of a canal. Billy isn’t the type to let things go. Some facts about Billy’s family: They’ve lived in six Florida towns because his mom wants a house near a bald eagle nest. His dad left when he was four and is a mystery. This summer, Billy will fly across the country, hike a mountain, float a river, dodge a grizzly bear, shoot down a spy drone, save a neighbor’s cat, an endangered panther, and try to save his father.

Classic Malley: Her parents are about to ship her off to boarding school, so she takes off with some guy she met online … Poor Richard: He’s less of a rebel than Malley, and a lot less trusting. He knows his cousin is in trouble before she does. Wild Skink: He’s a ragged, one-eyed, ex-governor of Florida, and enough of a renegade to think he can track Malley down. With Richard riding shotgun, this unlikely pair scour the state, undaunted by blinding storms, crazed pigs, flying bullets, and giant gators. A National Book Award Longlist Selection.

Bunny Starch, the most feared biology teacher ever, is missing. She disappeared after a school field trip to Black Vine Swamp. And, to be honest, the kids in her class are relieved. But when the principal tries to tell the students that Mrs. Starch has been called away on a “family emergency,” Nick and Marta just don’t buy it. No, they figure the class delinquent, Smoke, has something to do with her disappearance. And he does! But not in the way they think. There’s a lot more going on in Black Vine Swamp than any one player in this twisted tale can see. It’s all about to hit the fan, and when it does, the bad guys better scat.

Everybody loves Mother Paula’s pancakes. Everybody, that is, except the colony of cute but endangered owls that live on the building site of the new restaurant. Can the awkward new kid and his feral friend prank the pancake people out of town? Or is the owls’ fate cemented in pancake batter? A Newbery Honor winner and #1 New York Times bestseller.