Wicked humor

SummerTIME is Hiaasen time. The author of “Sick Puppy,” “Double Whammy” and “Strip Tease,” Carl Hiaasen has long been a reliable beach and pool pal for those who like intelligent thrills combined with humor that clings like barbed wire. His mise-en-scene is Florida. His enemies are Disney, developers and other dimwitted power brokers. His heroes are usually down on their luck, but because Hiaasen stacks the deck, they giddily prevail in the end.

“Skinny Dip,” Hiaasen’s 10th novel, commences at breakneck pace: On Page 1, Charles (Chaz) Perrone, a biologist, pushes his wife Joey over the railing of a cruise ship the night before it returns to Miami. The impact of the water tears off “her silk shirt, blouse, panties, wristwatch and sandals,” but unfortunately for Chaz, it doesn’t kill her, though he doesn’t realize this. The poor nude woman swims for her life, eventually catching hold of a marijuana bale that serves as a flotation device. She’s rescued the next morning by an ex-cop turned Robinson Crusoe named Mick Stranahan who lives on a small island in a house owned by an ailing Mexican novelist. While Chaz sobs to the authorities, explaining that his wife has disappeared (he hints that she’s committed suicide, noting that she’d been reading “Madame Bovary”), Joey Perrone is free to flit about South Florida as a ghost seeking revenge.

Bizarre bad guys are Hiaasen’s specialty. In “Skinny Dip,” Hiaasen supplies readers with a swamp ghoul named Tool who is as big and hairy as Sasquatch but is distinguished from that beast by his addiction to fentanyl patches. Applying this morphine substitute requires him to shave swaths of hair, causing him to resemble a motley mountain. He also steals roadside crosses, which he plants in the yard behind his trailer. Tool has been hired to watch over Chaz, now tormented by his supposedly deceased wife. Chaz is the Dip of “Skinny Dip,” a pernicious goof who doctors water samples so they will pass Environmental Protection Agency standards for Red Hammernut, an agribusiness titan who uses illegal levels of pesticides to fertilize his crops and in so doing is destroying the Everglades.

With names like Tool and Hammernut, Hiaasen is not subtle with his villains, but then they aren’t subtle in their villainy. When a stranger (Stranahan) calls to say he witnessed Chaz pitching his wife off the cruise ship and wants money to keep quiet, Team Tool, Hammernut and Perrone kick into high gear.

Do not say that Hiaasen hasn’t a heart. Chaz misses Joey very much. He complains, endlessly, of the fact that since murdering her he cannot muster a decent erection. Libidinal prowess was Chaz’s claim to greatness and, without Joey, he finds himself in detumescent distress. It is hard to know whether to cheer or grimace when Joey breaks into their house to mess with Chaz’s head only to find that he comes home early with a bimbo. They immediately take to the bed under which Joey is hiding. But Chaz is not up to the task. Such are the peculiar pains and pleasures of the novel.

“Skinny Dip” is a whopping cannonball splash of fun. In the real world, the Everglades is being demolished at a staggering rate. In Hiaasen’s Florida, the rapacious thugs who enact the carnage are made to pay in humiliating ways. Hooray for Hiaasen’s world. May it prevail. In the meantime, “Skinny Dip” is a terrific way to experience lots of laughs and plenty of vicarious vengeance. *