Review
Skinny Dip is a highly pleasurable reminder that Carl Hiaasen is one of the most quirky and entertaining of modern crime writers. His shadow on the genre has been so massive that his idiosyncratic, brittle-edged prose and sardonic humour may be found served up in the work of a host of imitators. There is no doubt that Hiaasen is at the top of the tree in his chosen field - and if a certain faltering has been evident of late, admirers were more than ready to be patient. Skinny Dip is a signal that the worries of Hiaasen admirers are at an end - the Master is back on form.The protagonist here is a woman, the luckless Joey Perrone. Joey has not made the wisest matrimonial choice, and her lowlife spouse Chaz has dumped her in the briny from the deck of a luxury cruise liner. She survives - but is her first action to shop her treacherous husband to the police? No, Joey has other ideas. She opts to maintain the fiction that she is now fish food, and inaugurates a little canny retaliation. Utilising her own support group - along with several individuals who have no love for Chaz - she begins to even the score.
This is vintage Hiaasen, with all the old splenetic energy back in place, along with the scorching one-liners that were the author's traditional stock-in-trade. Joey is a wonderful heroine, and the off-the-wall gallery of characters she encounters in her fightback against her husband are well up to the colourful standards we expect. --Barry Forshaw