Skinny Dip - Hardcover

Hiaasen, Carl

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375411089 ISBN 13: 9780375411083

Publisher: Knopf, 2004

Synopsis

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.

As Joey haunts and taunts her homicidal husband, as Chaz’s cold-blooded cohorts in pollution grow uneasy about his ineptitude and increasingly erratic behavior, as Mick Stranahan discovers that six failed marriages and years of island solitude haven’t killed the reckless romantic in him, we’re taken on a hilarious, full-throttle, pure Hiaasen ride through the warped politics and mayhem of the human environment, and the human heart.

About this title

About the Author

Carl Hiaasen was born and raised in Florida. He is the author of ten previous novels, including Sick Puppy, Lucky You, Stormy Weather, Basket Case, and, for young readers, Hoot. He also writes a regular column for the Miami Herald.

Reviews

Let me start with a confession: This is the first Carl Hiaasen novel that I've read, and so longtime admirers of his work should kindly forgive any oversights in what follows. Rest assured, though, that what does follow will be largely a rave. Normally, I would have tried to dig out one or two earlier Hiaasens before this one (Stormy Weather, Strip Tease, Skin Tight, etc.), but I was far from home and my usual resources: I started the book one evening while staying in a cottage surrounded by estuaries and reclaimed marshland. New Smyrna Beach, Fla., seemed the right place to read Carl Hiaasen, unless I were to drive four hours south on I-95 to Miami. I liked sitting in the gathering dark, a ceiling fan softly rotating overhead, surrounded by scrub oak and palmetto, with the passion fruit starting to ripen and the insects flittering and buzzing outside, as that evening sun went down.

I mention all this because several characters in Hiaasen's book -- the Travis McGee-like hero, Mick Stranahan; the crazed, one-eyed swamp hermit, the Captain; and a couple of others -- have appeared in previous novels. I would like to have known more about their earlier lives, but Hiaasen makes sure that his new story works perfectly well without such knowledge. Still, I'm sure that fans will derive an extra fillip of pleasure in recognizing old friends.

While on a cruise to celebrate their second wedding anniversary, Joey Perrone is pushed overboard one night by her husband, Chaz. "The impact tore off her silk skirt, blouse, panties, wristwatch and sandals, but Joey remained conscious and alert. Of course she did. She had been co-captain of her college swim team, a biographical nugget that her husband obviously had forgotten."

Once Joey surfaces, she starts swimming toward the distant lights of the Florida coast, but after some hours the young woman begins to tire -- Chaz had made her drink a lot of Merlot before the "accident" -- and then . . . "She had momentarily forgotten about the sharks, when something heavy and rough-skinned butted against her left breast. Thrashing and grunting, she beat at the thing with both fists until the last of her strength was gone."

Meanwhile, Chaz Perrone is telling the world how terrible he feels about Joey's disappearance -- it couldn't be suicide, could it? -- and secretly calling up his girlfriend, Ricca, and generally trying to disguise how much he is a cheat and a maggot. But cop Karl Rolvaag, in true Columbo fashion, feels that something isn't quite right here. Chaz is a marine biologist, a wetlands scientist testing for chemical pollution in the Everglades, and yet he doesn't appear to know the direction that the Gulf Stream flows, blithely allows his tropical fish to starve and even mixes his recyclables with the regular garbage. Rolvaag starts to dig into the case.

Joey survives, and her rescuer is none other than Mick Stranahan, 53, former cop, lean, easygoing, six times married (five times to waitresses), living alone on an island with his Doberman, a skiff, some books and a lot of fishing equipment. Shall we just say that he is every woman's dream? Joey, we learn, is 37, blonde, tomboyish, sexy and low-maintenance. In other words, every middle-aged man's fantasy. And she's rich, too. One of the pleasures of Skinny Dip lies in waiting for these two likable people to hook up, even if there is little doubt about it happening.

" 'Mick, I want to pay you for your help. Plus expenses, of course, including room and board.'

" 'I still can't promise I won't try to sleep with you,' he said. 'That's how I often behave when I meet someone attractive. It's only fair that you should know.'

" 'I appreciate the honesty. I do.'

" 'Don't worry, you'll see me coming about a mile away. I'm not real slick.'

" 'No?'

" 'French wine, moonlight and Neil Young, strictly acoustic.' "

After Joey recuperates, she decides that Chaz could beat an attempted murder rap -- her word against his -- and so she decides to stay dead for a while. Instead of going to the police, with Mick's help she sets in motion a plan to drive her priapic scumbag of a husband crazy and to discover why he tried to kill her. Finding the answer will ultimately involve some typical South Florida types: ruthless developer Samuel Johnson Hammernut; a man-mountain named Tool; the sexy Rose, whom no man can resist; Joey's sheep-herder brother, Corbett; Ricca, the mistress-hair stylist; the dogged Karl Rolvaag and his pet pythons; a sharp-tongued, religious cancer patient named Maureen; and, not least, the Captain.

Some crime novels are deadly serious, but Hiaasen belongs to the school of Elmore Leonard and Donald Westlake, preferring a breezy tone, grotesque characters, rampant wish fulfillment and action that remains essentially comic and even sentimental. Skinny Dip follows a traditional caper script, and one never really fears for any of the good guys; one simply waits to see how the baddies will receive their comeuppance. The fate of Chaz Perrone, for instance, could have been written by Evelyn Waugh. Waugh would certainly have admired Hiaasen's ironic wit:

"As Red Hammernut listened to Chaz Perrone's story, he thought of the many blessings that had come his way, but also of the toil. A big farming operation like his was a challenging enterprise, relying as it did on rampant pollution and the systematic mistreatment of immigrant labor. For Red it was no small feat to keep the feds off his back while at the same time soaking taxpayers for lucrative crop subsidies and dirt-cheap loans that might not be repaid this century. He reflected upon the hundreds of thousands of dollars that he'd handed out as campaign donations; the untallied thousands more for straight-up bribes, hookers, private-yacht charters, gambling stakes and other discreet favors; and finally the countless hours of ass-kissing he'd been forced to endure with the same knuckleheaded politicians whose loyalties he'd purchased.

"This was no easy gig. Red Hammernut got infuriated every time he heard some pissy liberal refer to the federal farm bill as corporate welfare. The term implied contented idleness, and nobody worked harder than Red to keep the money flowing. . . . "

Some readers might fault Skinny Dip for a slightly excessive zaniness -- does Joey really need to break into her house again and again? After a while it starts to feel like French farce, with the wronged wife actually hiding under the bed while her husband, suffering sexual difficulties since her "murder," tries to make it with a New Age chick named Medea. Poor Chaz. This Ken-doll sex fiend, this self-deceiving dolt, finds that everything is suddenly spinning out of control, even his handwriting: "He was alarmed to realize that his penmanship, once precise and consistent, had degenerated to the sort of sinuous, pinprick scrawl associated with UFO correspondents and future workplace snipers."

Skinny Dip, like other work by Hiaasen, warns against the depredations the Everglades continues to suffer, and hopes, in part, to provoke readers' ire against venal politicians and unscrupulous businessmen. But since all right-thinking people naturally assume rampant corruption in Florida, as elsewhere, what to actually do is the problem. And so most of us will simply sit back and enjoy Skinny Dip for its caper plot and its pervasive, engaging wit:

"Taking cover behind a magazine, Stranahan attempted to immerse himself in the travails of Eminem, a deep though conflicted young man. Apparently wealth, fame and unlimited sex are nice, but true spiritual happiness must come from within."

Waugh would smile at that sentence too.
Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

For two decades, Florida native Hiaasen has mined the seamy side of the Sunshine State. In his eleventh novel, he once again draws on his intricate knowledge of Florida’s cultural and natural landscape to weave together absurd, oddball characters (the hirsute “protector” Tool in particular) and an even more ludicrous plot. It’s entertainment galore—but, like Hiaasen’s previous novels, it comments strongly on environmental devastation and eco-justice. A few critics complain that the author doesn’t fully exploit the possibilities of his set-up—a large-scale government project to restore the Everglades. The pat ending, too, leaves something to be desired. Still, in his best form, Hiaasen provides “entertainment with an emotional punch” (Orlando Sentinel).

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

Hiaasen's signature mix of hilariously over-the-top villains, lovable innocents and righteous indignation at what mankind has done to his beloved Florida wilderness is all present in riotous abundance in his latest. It begins with attractive heiress Joey Perrone being tossed overboard from a cruise ship by her larcenous husband, Chaz—not for her money, which she has had the good sense to keep well away from him, but because he fears she is onto his crooked dealings with a ruthless tycoon who is poisoning the Everglades. But instead of drowning as she's supposed to, Joey stays afloat until she is rescued by moody ex-cop Mick Stranahan, a loner who has also struck out in the marriage department. Then the two together, with the unwitting aid of a suspicious cop who can't pin the attempted murder on Chaz, hatch a sadistic plot to scare that "maggot" out of what little wit he has. Even Tool, a hulking brute sent by the tycoon to keep an eye on Chaz, eventually turns against him, and much of the fun is in watching the deplorable Chaz flounder further and further in the murk, both literally and figuratively (Chaz's job, as the world's unlikeliest marine biologist, involves falsifying water pollution levels for the tycoon). Hiaasen's books are so enjoyable it's always a sad moment when they end. In this case, however, sadness is mixed with puzzlement because the book seems to end in mid-scene, with Chaz in trouble again—but is it terminal? We thought at first there were some pages missing, but Knopf says that was the ending Hiaasen intended. Odd.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

*Starred Review* What do you get when you cross a sleazy marine biologist, a corrupt tycoon with a bad comb-over, and a voluptuous wife hell-bent on revenge? Another delirious romp through the swamps of South Florida from irrepressible Miami Herald columnist Carl Hiaasen. Chaz Perrone was sure he'd seen the last of his wife when he pushed her over the balcony of the Sun Duchess cruise ship off the coast of Florida. But Joey Perrone, a former championship swimmer, survived the fall and clung to a bale of Jamaican hashish long enough to be rescued by retired cop Mick Stranahan. Joey wants to know why her husband wanted her dead (he feared she was onto his scheme of doctoring Florida Everglades water samples at the behest of ruthless agribusiness tycoon Red Hammernut). Then, with Stranahan's help, she wants to drive him crazy. No reprobate escapes the satirical eye of Hiaasen, who writes like the love child of Hunter S. Thompson and Evelyn Waugh. His trademark cast of skewed characters includes old favorites like Skink and new arrival, Tool, a hirsute, painkiller-addicted thug with a bullet lodged in a decidedly cheeky place. Like Hiaasen's nine previous novels, this one's a corker, chock-full of belly laughs and blistering truths. Allison Block
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

One

At the stroke of eleven on a cool April night, a woman named Joey Perrone went overboard from a luxury deck of the cruise liner M.V. Sun Duchess. Plunging toward the dark Atlantic, Joey was too dumbfounded to panic.

I married an asshole, she thought, knifing headfirst into the waves.

The impact tore off her silk skirt, blouse, panties, wristwatch and sandals, but Joey remained conscious and alert. Of course she did. She had been co-captain of her college swim team, a biographical nugget that her husband obviously had forgotten.

Bobbing in its fizzy wake, Joey watched the gaily lit Sun Duchess continue steaming away at twenty nautical miles per hour. Evidently only one of the other 2,049 passengers was aware of what had happened, and he wasn’t telling anybody.

Bastard, Joey thought.

She noticed that her bra was down around her waist, and she wriggled free of it. To the west, under a canopy of soft amber light, the coast of Florida was visible. Joey began to swim.

The water of the Gulf Stream was slightly warmer than the air, but a brisk northeasterly wind had kicked up a messy and uncomfortable chop. Joey paced herself. To keep her mind off sharks, she replayed the noteworthy events of the week-long cruise, which had begun almost as unpromisingly as it had ended.

The Sun Duchess had departed Port Everglades three hours late because a raccoon had turned up berserk in the pastry kitchen. One of the chefs had wrestled the frothing critter into a sixty-gallon tin of guava custard before it had shredded the man’s jowls and humped snarling to the depths of the ship. A capture team from Broward Animal Control had arrived, along with health inspectors and paramedics. Evacuated passengers were appeased with rum drinks and canapés.

Later, while reboarding, Joey had passed the Animal Control officers trudging empty-handed down the gangplank.

“I bet they couldn’t catch it,” she’d whispered to her husband. Despite the inconvenience caused by the raccoon, she’d found herself rooting for the addled little varmint.

“Rabies,” her husband had said knowingly. “Damn thing lays a claw on me, I’ll own this frigging cruise line.”

“Oh, please, Chaz.”

“From then on, you can call me Onassis. Think I’m kidding?”

The Sun Duchess was 855 feet long and weighed a shade more than seventy thousand tons. Joey had learned this from a brochure she’d found in their stateroom. The itinerary included Puerto Rico, Nassau and a private Bahamian island that the cruise lines had purchased (rumor had it) from the widow of a dismembered heroin trafficker. The last port of call before the ship returned to Fort Lauderdale was to be Key West.

Chaz had selected the cruise himself, claiming it was a present for their wedding anniversary. The first evening he’d spent on the fantail, slicing golf balls into the ocean. Initially Joey had been annoyed that the Sun Duchess would offer a driving range, much less a fake rock-climbing wall and squash courts. She and Chaz could have stayed in Boca and done all that.

No less preposterous was the ship’s tanning parlor, which received heavy traffic whenever the skies turned overcast. The cruise company wanted every passenger to return home with either a bronze glow or a crimson burn, proof of their seven days in the tropics.

As it turned out, Joey wound up scaling the rock wall and tak- ing full advantage of the other amenities, even the two-lane bowling alley. The alternative was to eat and drink herself sick, gluttony being the principal recreation aboard cruise liners. The Sun Duchess was renowned for its twenty-four-hour surf-and-turf buffets, and that’s how Joey’s husband had spent the hours between ports.

Pig, she thought, submerging to shed a clot of seaweed that had wrapped around her neck like a sodden yule garland.

Each day’s sunrise had brought a glistening new harbor, yet the towns and straw markets were drearily similar, as if designed and operated by a franchise. Joey had earnestly tried to be charmed by the native wares, though many appeared to have been crafted in Singapore or South Korea. And what would one do with a helmet conch clumsily retouched with nail polish? Or a coconut husk bearing a hand-painted likeness of Prince Harry?

So grinding was the role of tourist that Joey had found herself looking forward to visiting the ship’s “unspoiled private island,” as it had been touted in the brochure. Yet that, too, proved dispiriting. The cruise line had mendaciously renamed the place Rapture Key while making only a minimal effort at restoration. Roosters, goats and feral hogs were the predominant fauna, having outlasted the smuggler who had been raising them for banquet fare. The island’s sugar-dough flats were pocked with hulks of sunken drug planes, and the only shells to be found along the tree-shorn beach were of the .45-caliber variety.

“I’m gonna rent a Jet Ski,” Chaz had cheerily decreed.

“I’ll try to find some shade,” Joey had said, “and finish my book.”

The distance between them remained wide and unexplored. By the time the Sun Duchess had reached Key West, Joey and Chaz were spending only about one waking hour a day together, an interval usually devoted to either sex or an argument. It was pretty much the same schedule they kept at home.

So much for the romantic latitudes, Joey had thought, wishing she felt sadder than she did.

When her husband had scampered off to “check out the action” at Mallory Square, she briefly considered seducing one of the cabin attendants, a fine Peruvian brute named Tico. Ultimately Joey had lost the urge, dismissing the crestfallen young fellow with a peck on the chin and a fifty-dollar tip. She didn’t feel strongly enough about Chaz to cheat on him even out of spite, although she suspected he’d cheated on her often (and quite possibly during the cruise).

Upon returning to the Sun Duchess, Chaz had been as chatty as a cockatoo on PCP.

“See all those clouds? It’s about to rain,” he’d proclaimed with a peculiar note of elation.

“I guess that means no golf tonight,” Joey had said.

“Hey, I counted twenty-six T-shirt shops on Duval Street. No wonder Hemingway blew his brains out.”

“That wasn’t here,” Joey had informed him. “That was in Idaho.”

“How about some chow? I could eat a whale.”

At dinner Chaz had kept refilling Joey’s wineglass, over her protests. Now she understood why.

She felt it, too, that dehydrated alcohol fatigue. She’d been kicking hard up the crests of the waves and then breast-stroking down the troughs, but now she was losing both her rhythm and stamina. This wasn’t the heated Olympic pool at UCLA; it was the goddamn Atlantic Ocean. Joey scrunched her eyelids to dull the saltwater burn.

I had a feeling he didn’t love me anymore, she thought, but this is ridiculous.





Chaz Perrone listened for a splash but heard nothing except the deep lulling rumble of the ship’s engines. Head cocked slightly, he stood at the rail as solitary and motionless as a heron.

He hadn’t planned to toss her here. He had hoped to do it earlier in the voyage, somewhere between Nassau and San Juan, with the expectation that the currents would carry her body into Cuban waters, safely out of U.S. jurisdiction.

If the bull sharks didn’t find her first.

Unfortunately, the weather had been splendid during that early leg of the cruise, and every night the outside decks were crowded with moony-eyed couples. Chaz’s scheme required seclusion and he’d nearly abandoned hope, when the rain arrived, three hours after leaving Key West. It was only a drizzle, but Chaz knew it would drive the tourists indoors, stampeding for the lobster salad and electronic poker machines.

The second crucial element of his plot was surprise, Joey being a physically well-tuned woman and Chaz himself being somewhat softer and out of shape. Before luring her toward the stern of the Sun Duchess under the ruse of a starlit stroll, he’d made certain that his wife had consumed plenty of red wine; four and a half glasses, by his count. Two was usually enough to make her drowsy.

“Chaz, it’s sprinkling,” she had observed as they approached the rail.

Naturally she’d been puzzled, knowing how her husband despised getting wet. The man owned no less than seven umbrellas.

Pretending not to hear her, he had guided Joey forward by the elbow. “My stomach’s a disaster. I think it’s time they retired that seviche, don’t you?”

“Let’s go back inside,” Joey had suggested.

From a pocket of his blue blazer Chaz had surreptitiously removed the key to their stateroom and let it fall to the polished planks at his feet. “Oops.”

“Chaz, it’s getting chilly out here.”

“I think I dropped our key,” he’d said, stooping to find it. Or so Joey had assumed.

He could only guess what had shot through his wife’s mind when she’d felt him grab her ankles. He’s gotta be kidding, is what she’d probably thought.

The act itself was a rudimentary exercise in leverage, really, flipping her backward over the rail. It had happened so fast, she hadn’t made a peep.

As for the splash, Chaz would have preferred to hear it; a soft punctuation to the marriage and the crime. Then again, it was a long way down to the water.

He allowed himself a brief glance, but saw only whitecaps and foam in the roiling reflection of the ship’s lights. The Sun Duchess kept moving, which was a relief. No Klaxons sounded.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0375411089
• ISBN 13: 9780375411083
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 368