Carl Hiaasen
Carl Hiaasen (1953 - ) is a Florida-born journalist, essayist, and novelist who has both embodied and transcended his native state. He embodies it by knowing it as well as any living writer, with the possible good company of Dave Barry. He transcends it by possessing the ability and artistry to view it with critical distance. He can work up a powerful passion of iconoclasm, a muckraker’s ferocious energy in going after the criminals, especially in environmental concerns. Simultaneously, however, he is a careful and fair observer of how the strange state of Florida works from day to day.
In my many years’ experience with the state (I still have family in Sarasota), I have traveled it north to south, east to west, Hiaasen captures it as well as Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and John D. Macdonald did. His skill at creating colorful characters and winging wild plots with gusto has disguised sometimes his remarkable writing. Up here in central Pennsylvania he is one of my bestselling “mystery” writers, suggesting that good writing has no regional limitations.
Please note that I carry all his adult fiction, his columns from his long career at the Miami Herald, and his fine young adult novels.
Nature Girl
Nature Girl
From the funniest important writer in America (Miami Herald) comes a tale that is gleefully zany and incisively sharp.
Beware! Honey Santana is off her meds, reacting rapidly to the bad behavior of others. This time, the annoyer is a telemarketer from Texas. Honey's revenge? She invites Boyd Shreave on a paid ecotour of the Everglades, where a blueeyed Seminole named Sammy Tigertail strums an electric guitar on a woe-begotten clump of shells, mangroves, and beer cans called Dismal Key. Soon Boyd and vengeancecrazed Honey are joined by a private eye with a red-hot video camera and a college girl who just wants to have fun. And with a brawling cast of lunatic men, desperate women, a skateboarding teen, and even a restless ghost all going native, who will protect the Everglades from the wild humans?