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Summary
Summary
Meet twenty-two-year-old Cherry Pye (nee Cheryl Bunterman), a pop star since she was fourteen 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. The challenge for Cherry s handlers 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 . . .
Will Bang Abbott achieve his fantasy of a lucrative private photo session with Cherry Pye? Will Cherry sober up in time to lip-synch her way through her concert tour? Will Skink track down Ann DeLusia before Cherry s motley posse does? All will be revealed in this hilarious spin on life in the celebrity fast lane."
Author Notes
Carl Hiaasen was born in Fort Lauderdale, Florida on March 12, 1953. He received a degree in journalism from the University of Florida in 1974. He has been a reporter and columnist for the Miami Herald since 1976, and is known for exposing scandal and corruption throughout southern Florida. He has received numerous state and national honors for his journalism and commentary including the Damon Runyon Award from the Denver Press Club. His work has also appeared in numerous magazines including Sports Illustrated, Playboy, Time, Life, Esquire and Gourmet.
His best-selling novels include Double Whammy, Skin Tight, Native Tongue, Stormy Weather, Lucky You, Sick Puppy, Basket Case, Nature Girl and Razor Girl. His 1993 novel, Striptease, was adapted as a film in 1996 starring Demi Moore and Burt Reynolds. He also writes children's books including Hoot, which was awarded a Newbery Honor; Flush; and Scat. Hoot was adapted into a film in 2006. His non-fiction works include Team Rodent; The Downhill Lie: A Hacker's Return to a Ruinous Sport; and two collections of his newspaper columns entitled Kick Ass and Paradise Screwed. In 2013 his titles Chomp and Bad Monkey made The New York Times bestseller list. In 2014, his non-fiction title Dance of the Reptiles made it to the New York Times bestseller list. Skink - No Surrender made the New York Times bestseller list in 2014.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (2)
Guardian Review
Who would be a paparazzo? Bang Abbott, the Nikon-toting antihero of Carl Hiaasen's latest tear through the American dream, has been concussed by Queen Latifah, spat at by Woody Harrelson and pissed on by Charlie Sheen. As the novel progresses, he is shot in the hand with his own gun, shot in the arse with someone else's and lacerated by a prosthetic weed trimmer. Abbott, a veteran of deathbed intrusions and nursery ambushes, is unrepentant about his trade. "We're just feedin' the beast," he explains. "Soon as nobody cares about Hollywood anymore, we're all out of business." The relationship between celebrities, the press and the public is dramatised in predictably over-the-top style by Hiaasen, whose Florida-based, eco-friendly capers sell by the bucketload. The plot swings on Abbott's kidnap of Cherry Pye, a 22-year-old professional hedonist whose ambitious mother and perverse manager have propelled her to pop superstardom despite the fact that she "couldn't yodel her way out of the back of a broom closet". Abbott wants Pye at his disposal so he can create the shoot that defines the singer for posterity and sets him on the road to riches. Unfortunately for him, he manages to kidnap not the vacuous Pye but her resolute body double Ann DeLusia, who impersonates the star when she's too intoxicated to show her face. With massive publicity and the fate of Cherry's latest opus, Skantily Klad, at stake, the Pye camp is mobilised: should they hush things up or seek to profit from the scandal? It makes for a loose and raucous novel, with Hiaasen liberally dosing his villains with deformities and misfortunes, disparaging any music that isn't classic rock and reintroducing regular character Clinton "Skink" Tyree, who doesn't have much to do besides attaching a spiny sea urchin to a greedy developer's groin. Hiaasen seems to be doing things by numbers now: characterisation is generally a means to a cheap laugh, which means his protagonists are easy to get a handle on and hard to like - and that goes for the righteous good guys, too. All this makes Star Island feel like the shallow light entertainment it seeks to satirise, littered with celebs and their grubby secrets, and Abbott's brash words about the symbiotic relationship between celebs and their watchers never really get probed. Famous folk also populate Leo Benedictus's intriguing first novel, The Afterparty - and as in Hiaasen's work, they show little talent besides the ability to consume large quantities of drugs and alcohol, make small talk and attract disaster. The disaster in this instance is a fall from a roof at a London party, held by movie star Hugo Marks to celebrate his 31st birthday. An unsurprisingly motley crew of musicians, film-makers and hangers-on are in attendance, including Michael, a shy journo who sneaks on to the guest list and is surprised to find he gets on rather well with Hugo, the pair bonding over whisky and frustration as they eye up rolling news coverage of the Pope's last days. Michael's tale emerges chapter by chapter, each sent as an attachment by budding author William Mendez, whose email dialogue with his agent Valerie Morrell punctuates this book, both commenting on the story and becoming a plot strand in its own right. Mendez craves anonymity so much that he agrees to let a Guardian journalist, one Leo Benedictus, put his name on the novel. And, just to add another layer to this metafictional mesh, the accident itself bears parallels to the real-life case of Mark Blanco, who fell to his death at a party at which former Libertines' frontman Pete Doherty was present. We are, of course, in edgy, post-modern territory here. Morrell analyses Benedictus - "a merry sort of cove, with a taste for provocation" - and details the bidding war between Jonathan Cape and Bloomsbury. Mendez muses on his techniques ("of course Pete Sheen is like Pete Doherty, but that hardly means he's supposed to be a cipher for him - I called him Pete because it suits the character") and proposes fake reviews ("The Heat generation has found its Bret Easton Ellis".) There are several irksome touches here - anyone who tweets #theafterpartybook will apparently get their comment printed in an afterword to the paperback edition, which feels less like a brave literary experiment and more like a direct marketing operation. But Benedictus does some fun stuff too, weaving direct excerpts from real interviews into his conversations, and the narrative voice flows with wit and vigour as it moves from Benedictus and Mendez's emails to hapless Michael, Marks's drug-guzzling wife Mellody and Calvin Vance, a gormless X Factor runner-up. As Michael progresses from quaking with party fear to seeing Mark Wahlberg off into the night, so Mendez moves to centre stage, while the police investigation gathers pace and the paps' cameras snap. Hiaasen's good guys may emerge unscathed, but Michael finds it harder to walk away. Both novels contain moments that capture the media circus rather nicely, especially the finely observed spectacle of Michael, desperate for diary quotes, wriggling his way sweatily around the early stages of Marks's party. Neither book probes too deeply into the nature of celebrity: Hiaasen is more concerned with bringing his plot to a merry conclusion, and Benedictus is keener on literature's hoariest issues - truth and storytelling. His debut ties author and reader in engaging knots that echo the tangled webs connecting the gossipers and photographers and their privileged fodder. The hangover that follows its deeply compromised, grimy account of a party-turned-wake sticks far longer in the mind than all Hiaasen's wisecracks and moralising. To order Star Island for pounds 11.99 or The Afterparty for pounds 10.39, both with free UK p&p, call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846. guardian.co.uk/bookshop - James Smart Famous folk also populate Leo Benedictus's intriguing first novel, The Afterparty - and as in [Carl Hiaasen]'s work, they show little talent besides the ability to consume large quantities of drugs and alcohol, make small talk and attract disaster. The disaster in this instance is a fall from a roof at a London party, held by movie star Hugo Marks to celebrate his 31st birthday. An unsurprisingly motley crew of musicians, film-makers and hangers-on are in attendance, including [Michael, Marks], a shy journo who sneaks on to the guest list and is surprised to find he gets on rather well with Hugo, the pair bonding over whisky and frustration as they eye up rolling news coverage of the Pope's last days. Michael's tale emerges chapter by chapter, each sent as an attachment by budding author William Mendez, whose email dialogue with his agent Valerie Morrell punctuates this book, both commenting on the story and becoming a plot strand in its own right. Mendez craves anonymity so much that he agrees to let a Guardian journalist, one Leo Benedictus, put his name on the novel. And, just to add another layer to this metafictional mesh, the accident itself bears parallels to the real-life case of Mark Blanco, who fell to his death at a party at which former Libertines' frontman Pete Doherty was present. - James Smart.
New York Review of Books Review
Whenever it seems as if he might be running out of oxen to gore, Carl Hiaasen comes up with fresh victims for his killing wit. In STAR ISLAND (Knopf, $26.95), Florida's most entertainingly indignant social critic is in high dudgeon about those prodigal celebrities who descend on Miami with their uncouth fans and surly entourages, selfishly appropriating South Beach as their personal playground. Bundling up the most outrageous demands and self-indulgent behavior of this egocentric tribe into one over-the-top caricature, Hiaasen presents us with Cherry Pye, a 22-year-old pop star whose every display of narcissistic excess will send a frisson of horrified delight up your spine. When first met, this divine monster is vomiting into a silver-plated ice bucket, en route to Jackson Memorial Hospital after ingesting copious amounts of "vodka, Red Bull, hydrocodone, birdseed and stool softener" in the drug-addled belief that she might be reborn as a cockatoo. But not to worry. Ann DeLusia, Cherry's "undercover stunt double," is already on the job, impersonating the fun-loving star while the genuine article is whisked off to rehab - eluding even Cherry's savvy paparazzo stalker, Bang Abbott, who's counting on her to have a spectacular flame-out before the release of her comeback album, "Skantily Klad." Since Cherry is too spaced out to know she even has a double, it doesn't cramp her wild-child style when Bang mistakenly kidnaps Ann. But everyone else playing on Team Cherry - a roguish company that includes the star's pushy mother and sleazy promoter; cold-blooded twin publicists; and a hulking bodyguard, the freakishly disfigured Chemo - is quick to see the gravity of the situation. Trying to follow the plot, which involves a supporting cast of crooked politicians and predatory developers, is a little like walking a puppy. But the outlandish events soar on the exuberance of Hiaasen's manic style, a canny blend of lunatic farce and savage satire. (Chemo, who wears a prosthetic weed-whacker, shows his superior grasp of comic weaponry by taking a cattle prod to Cherry whenever she uses the words "awesome," "sweet," "sick," "totally" and "hot.") Although South Beach doesn't need saving the way the Everglades do, its loose values make it a natural magnet for the free-booting exploiters who arouse Hiaasen's scorn - and, in Cherry's case, his dumb-founded awe. Martin Walker's bucolic mysteries set in the fruitful Périgord region of France offer a gentle reminder to slow down and smell the grapes. Having captured the area's robust flavor and sleepy pace in "Bruno, Chief of Police," Walker returns to the tiny village of Saint-Denis in THE DARK VINEYARD (Knopf, $23.95) to confound Bruno Courrèges, the local policeman, with a suspicious fire at an agricultural research station experimenting with genetically modified crops. Perhaps coincidentally, an American businessman arrives in the district with a proposal to establish a winery that would alter the face of the countryside. Bruno handles both cases with great discretion, circulating so quietly and tactfully among his neighbors that his interviews are more like friendly visits. It's a wonderful detection method and an even cannier literary strategy, allowing Walker to pursue the plot of his mystery while beguiling the reader with extended scenes of village market days, old-fashioned wine harvests and some exceptionally congenial dinner parties. Since we can't seem to get enough of sleeper spies, let's look in on Louis Morgon, the retired C.I.A. undercover operative who figures in Peter Steiner's sweetly sane novels of international intrigue. In THE TERRORIST (Thomas Dunne/Minotaur, $23.99), Louis, now 71, is still living in the little French town of Saint Leon but making trips to Algiers to visit Zariana Lefort, the son of a colleague killed in Marseilles. In arranging to send the 16-year-old boy to school in Washington, Louis attracts the notice of a rogue agent who figures them both for covert operatives and has Zaharia thrown into a black-ops prison in Tajikistan. Or possibly Uzbekistan. Even as Louis insists that "I'm too old for danger," he flies to Cairo to find a bona fide terrorist to swap for his ward. While it can't be said that any of this is the least bit plausible, Steiner presents us with a reassuring fantasy world in which rash youths bow to the wisdom of their elders, terrorists abort their missions out of compassion for their human targets and the innocent victims of egregious acts of cruelty find it in their hearts to forgive. If exposure to the glories of Florence can elevate the creative output of artists and poets, you'd think the city might give a little boost to the turgid style of a best-selling author like Lorenzo Carcaterra. But no. Although MIDNIGHT ANGELS (Ballantine, $26) does raise the exciting prospect of watching rival teams of art hunters, the Vittoria Society and the Immortals, fighting it out for possession of three lost master-pieces by Michelangelo, this Big Kids Adventure Book turns out to be just another camera-ready thriller. The style veers from flat description, as applied to monuments like the Duomo and the Vasari Corridor (where the sculptures are hidden in a secret room), to pure hyperbole, which works fine in action scenes but pumps up the characters to cartoon dimension. If it weren't for pleasurable incidentals like a vignette of the "vibrant pageantry" of a Sunday morning in the city, we might as well be on a film set. The loose values of South Beach make it a natural magnet for the exploiters who arouse Carl Hiaasen's scorn.
Excerpts
Excerpts
1 On the fifteenth of March, two hours before sunrise, an emergency medical technician named Jimmy Campo found a sweaty stranger huddled in the back of his ambulance. It was parked in a service alley behind the Stefano Hotel, where Jimmy Campo and his partner had been summoned to treat a twenty-two-year-old white female who had swallowed an unwise mix of vodka, Red Bull, hydrocodone, birdseed and stool softener--in all respects a routine South Beach 911 call, until now. The stranger in Jimmy Campo's ambulance had two 35-mm digital cameras hanging from his fleshy neck, and a bulky gear bag balanced on his ample lap. He wore a Dodgers cap and a Bluetooth ear set. His ripe, florid cheeks glistened damply, and his body reeked like a prison laundry bag. "Get out of my ambulance," Jimmy Campo said. "Is she dead?" the man asked excitedly. "Dude, I'm callin' the cops if you don't move it." "Who's with her up there--Colin? Shia?" The stranger outweighed Jimmy Campo by sixty-five pounds but not an ounce of it was muscle. Jimmy Campo, who'd once been a triathlete, dragged the intruder from the vehicle and deposited him on the sticky pavement beneath a streetlight. "Chill, for Christ's sake," the man said, examining his camera equipment for possible damage. Stray cats tangled and yowled somewhere in the shadows. Inside the ambulance, Jimmy Campo found what he was looking for: a sealed sterile packet containing a coiled intravenous rig to replace the one that the female overdose victim had ripped from her right arm while she was thrashing on the floor. The stranger struggled to his feet and said, "I'll give you a thousand bucks." "For what?" "When you bring her downstairs, lemme take a picture." The man dug into the folds of his stale trousers and produced a lump of cash. "You gotta job to do, and so do I. Here's a grand." Jimmy Campo looked at the money in the stranger's hand. Then he glanced up at the third floor of the hotel, where his partner was almost certainly dodging vomit. "Is she famous or somethin'?" Jimmy Campo asked. The photographer chuckled. "Man, you don't even know?" Jimmy Campo was thinking about the fifty-two-inch high-def that he'd seen on sale at Brands Mart. He was thinking about his girlfriend on a rampage with his maxed-out MasterCard at the Dadeland Mall. He was thinking about all those nasty letters from his credit union. "Whoever she is, she's not dead," he told the photographer. "Not tonight." "Cool." The man continued to hold out the wad of hundreds in the glow of the streetlight, as if teasing a mutt with raw hamburger. He said, "All you gotta do, before loading her in the wagon, just pull down the covers and step away so I can get my shot. Five seconds is all I need." "It won't be pretty. She's a sick young lady." Jimmy Campo took the crumpled money and smoothed it into his wallet. "Is she awake at least?" the photographer asked. "On and off." "But you could see her eyes in a picture, right? She's got those awesome sea-green eyes." Jimmy Campo said, "I didn't notice." "You really don't know who she is? Seriously?" "Who do you work for, anyway?" "A limited partnership," the man said. "Me, myself and I." "And where can I see this great picture you're gonna take?" "Everywhere. You'll see it everywhere," the stranger said. Eighteen minutes later, Jimmy Campo and his partner emerged from the Stefano Hotel guiding a collapsible stretcher upon which lay a slender, motionless form. The photographer was surprised at the absence of a retinue; no bodyguards or boyfriends or hangers-on. A lone Miami Beach police officer followed the stretcher down the alley. When the photographer began snapping pictures, the cop barely reacted, making no effort to shield the stricken woman from the flash bursts. That should have been a clue. Sliding closer, the paparazzo intercepted the stretcher as it rolled with an oscillating squeak toward the open end of the ambulance. True to his word, Jimmy Campo tugged down the sheet and stepped away, leaving an opening. "Cherry!" the photographer shouted at the slack face. "Cherry, baby, how 'bout a big smile for your fans?" The young woman's incurious eyes were open. They were not sea-green, mint-green, pea-green or any hue of green. They were brown. "Goddammit," the photographer growled, lowering his Nikon. The woman on the stretcher grinned behind the oxygen mask and blew him a kiss. Grabbing at Jimmy Campo's arm, the photographer cried, "Gimme back my money!" "Mister, I don't know what you're talking about," said the paramedic, elbowing the sweaty creep back into the shadows. Excerpted from Star Island by Carl Hiaasen All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
