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Summary
Summary
The only trace of the first victim was his Shriner's fez washed up on the Miami beach. The second victim, the head of the city's chamber of commerce, was found dead with a toy rubber alligator lodged in his throat. And that was just the beginning... Now Brian Keyes, reporter turned private eye, must move from muckraking to rooting out murder, in a caper that will mix football players, politicians, and police with a group of fanatics and a very hungry crocodile.
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)
Publisher's Weekly Review
When the president of the Miami Chamber of Commerce is found dead inside a suitcase with his legs sawn off and a rubber alligator stuffed down his throat, news and police locals prefer to believe it's simply another typical South Florida crime. But when letters from a terrorist group, Las Noches de Diciembre, link the man's death to the disappearances of a visiting Shriner and a Canadian tourist, former newsman (now private eye) Brian Keyes intuits that someone is out to kill Florida's tourist trade. His investigation leads him to an old journalism crony obsessed with fury against the state's irresponsible development policies. Miami Herald columnist Hiaasen writes with a seriousness of intent and knack for characterization which, unfortunately, outstrip his comic talents. This is an auspicious solo debut for the serious Hiaasen (he has written three thrillers with William Montalbano), but a lukewarm one for him as a potential comic-absurdist. (March 24p (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Satiric mystery adventure about a crazed Miami reporter and an eruption of bloodlust meant to drive off the tourists and developers. It's December and the loyal Shriners have arrived in southern Florida for their annual Miami Beach bash. Theodore Bellamy goes out for a swim with his wife Nell, gets stung by a man-of-war and after two fake ""lifeguards"" take him off to a hospital, disappears. What happens to B.D. ""Sparky"" Harper, President of the Greater Miami Chamber of Commerce, is much worse: with a toy rubber alligator stuffed down his throat, his 190 pounds (smeared with suntan oil) are chewed off at the knees and stuffed into a piece of Samsonite luggage, head and all--wearing black wraparound sunglasses. And that's just the start of varied bombings, an aerial assault (dropping rattlesnakes) on a cruise ship, and other horrors perpetrated by the so-called ""El Fuego, Comandante, Las Noches de Diciembre"" (The Fire, the Nights of December). Brian Keyes, private investigator, is hired to help defend Ernesto Cabal, small-time burglar accused of murdering Harper for his car. Brian's investigation eventually circles back to the Miami Sun--where there are many, many nuts, chief of whom is Skip Wiley, a once-celebrated columnist whose lunatic writings are so bizarre that his own editor has put Wiley and his columns under psychiatric examination. Chief terrorist Wiley at last kidnaps the Orange Bowl Queen and stakes her onto a coral isle that is about to be dynamited for later bulldozing by land developers. What Wiley hates is ""an entire generation of blow-dried rapists with phones in their Volvos and five-million-dollar lines of credit and secretaries who give head""--i.e., greedy, blind land-developers. Hiaasen gives an up-to-date sharpness to the old Hecht-MacArthur Front Page cynicism as he slices up limbs for his boiling pot-of-horrors. With this kind of thick-skinned black humor, real feelings would be intrusive--even about ecology and the rape of Florida. Everything is sacrificed to a news-hound humor that is as forced as it is cynical. But if you like your gallows laughs with gall, this could be for you. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
