Skinny Dip

Skinny Dip

Carl Hiaasen

Literature & Fiction / Outdoors & Nature / Nonfiction

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. BONUS: This edition includes an excerpt from Carl Hiaasen's Bad Monkey.
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Tourist Season

Tourist Season

Carl Hiaasen

Literature & Fiction / Outdoors & Nature / Nonfiction

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
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Native Tongue

Native Tongue

Carl Hiaasen

Literature & Fiction / Outdoors & Nature / Nonfiction

"Ruthlessly wicked...Wonderful...His best book yet." ATLANTA JOURNAL & CONSTITUTION When the precious clue-tongued mango voles at the Amazing Kingdom of Thrills on North Key Largo are stolen by heartless, ruthless thugs, Joe Winder wants to uncover why, and find the voles. Joe is lately a PR man for the Amazing Kingdom theme park, but now that the voles are gone, Winder is dragged along in their wake through a series of weird and lethal events that begin with the sleazy real-estate agent/villain Francis X. Kingsbury and can end only one way.... BONUS: This edition includes an excerpt from Carl Hiaasen's Bad Monkey.
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Assume the Worst: The Graduation Speech You'll Never Hear

Assume the Worst: The Graduation Speech You'll Never Hear

Carl Hiaasen

Literature & Fiction / Outdoors & Nature / Nonfiction

This is Oh, the Places You’ll Never Go–the ultimate hilarious, cynical, but absolutely realistic view of a college graduate’s future. And what he or she can or can’t do about it. “This commencement address will never be given, because graduation speakers are supposed to offer encouragement and inspiration. That’s not what you need. You need a warning.” So begins Carl Hiaasen’s attempt to prepare young men and women for their future. And who better to warn them about their precarious paths forward than Carl Hiaasen? The answer, after reading Assume the Worst, is: Nobody. And who better to illustrate–and with those illustrations, expand upon and cement Hiaasen’s cynical point of view–than Roz Chast, best-selling author/illustrator and National Book Award winner? The answer again is easy: Nobody. Following the format of Anna Quindlen’s commencement address (Being Perfect) and George Saunders’s commencement address (Congratulations, by the way), the collaboration of Hiaasen and Chast might look typical from the outside, but inside it is anything but. This book is bound to be a classic, sold year after year come graduation time. Although it’s also a good gift for anyone starting a job, getting married, or recently released from prison. Because it is not just funny. It is, in its own Hiaasen way, extremely wise and even hopeful. Well, it might not be full of hope, but there are certainly enough slivers of the stuff in there to more than keep us all going.
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The Edible Exile

The Edible Exile

Carl Hiaasen

Literature & Fiction / Outdoors & Nature / Nonfiction

Cuervo is a pampered Nicaraguan moneyman, funding a guerrilla war from his cushy Miami penthouse. Sixto is his hulking, pistol-packing attendant, whose job satisfaction is on the wane. When an aging mobster enters their lives with a promise to help the rebel cause-with a planeload of chickens originally intended for voodoo sacrifice-a tense situation turns combustible. From the wickedly funny mind of Carl Hiaasen comes "The Edible Exile," a raucous story of sleazeball nihilists, lovable thugs, and jungle-weary freedom fighters who collide in a battle of wills, ego, and the almighty dollar. This cheeky tale, written twenty-five years ago, set aside, and recently rediscovered, is a time-capsule glimpse of Miami during the over-the-top 1980s, when everyone was on the make and gross excess was the order of the day. In an intriguing twist, Hiaasen had lost his original ending to the story. "So I decided to write a new ending," he says. "As a friend said, 'How often does a writer get the opportunity to collaborate with a younger version of himself?'" "The Edible Exile" is a wild romp through Hiaasen Country, sure to appeal to the outlaw in all of us. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Carl Hiaasen was born and raised in Florida, where he still lives with his incredibly tolerant family. He is the author of several bestselling novels, including "Strip Tease," "Stormy Weather," "Lucky You," "Sick Puppy," "Basket Case," "Skinny Dip," "Nature Girl," "Star Island," and, most recently, "Bad Monkey." He has also written a number of novels for young readers: "Hoot," "Flush," "Scat," and "Chomp." At age twenty-three, he joined the "Miami Herald" as a general assignment reporter and went on to work for the paper's weekly magazine and later its prizewinning investigations team. Since 1985, Hiaasen has been writing a regular column, which still appears most Sundays in the Herald's opinion-and-editorial section. "Dance of the Reptiles," a new collection of his columns, will be published in January 2014 by Vintage. PRAISE FOR CARL HIAASEN "A relentlessly sane voice in a hurricane of hypocrisy, hokum and hype." -Dave Barry "Does anyone remember what we did for fun before Hiaasen began turning out his satirical comedies?" -The San Francisco Chronicle "Carl Hiaasen isn't just Florida's sharpest satirist-he's one of the few funny writers left in the whole country . . . I think of him as a national treasure." -Newsweek "Hiaasen [is] a superb national satirist . . . A great American writer about the great American subjects of ambition, greed, vanity and disappointment." -Entertainment Weekly "No one writes about Florida with a more wicked sense of humor than Hiaasen." -USA Today "Hiaasen's wasteland is as retributive as Cormac McCarthy's, but funnier. . . . [His] pacing is impeccable, and the scenes follow one another like Lay's potato chips." -The New York Times Book Review "Recalls Twain and Chandler in its mingling of the cultured and the coarse ... The funniest writer around." -Sunday Times of London
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Naked Came the Manatee

Naked Came the Manatee

Carl Hiaasen

Literature & Fiction / Outdoors & Nature / Nonfiction

In South Florida, everyone wants to get a head. But not just any head. A very famous human head--severed and snugged away in a cryonic container. A head that could spark a revolution and change the course of history. Everybody wants a piece of the noggin: rotund gangster Big Joey G., a 102-year-old environmentalist, hard-boiled Miami reporter Britt Montero, lawyer Jake Lassiter, and a would-be dictator in exile--with ex-president Jimmy Carter and a lovable manatee named Booger thrown in for good measure. With bodies piling up it's anybody's guess what will happen from one chapter to the next, as an all-star line-up of Florida's finest writers take turns at taking this outrageously original novel to the limit--and beyond.
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Scat

Scat

Carl Hiaasen

Literature & Fiction / Outdoors & Nature / Nonfiction

Bestselling author and columnist Carl Hiaasen returns with another hysterical mystery for kids set in Florida's Everglades. Bunny Starch, the most feared biology teacher ever, is missing. She disappeared after a school field trip to Black Vine Swamp. And, to be honest, the kids in her class are relieved. But when the principal tries to tell the students that Mrs. Starch has been called away on a "family emergency," Nick and Marta just don't buy it. No, they figure the class delinquent, Smoke, has something to do with her disappearance. And he does! But not in the way they think. There's a lot more going on in Black Vine Swamp than any one player in this twisted tale can see. And Nick and Marta will have to reckon with an eccentric eco-avenger, a stuffed rat named Chelsea, a wannabe Texas oilman, a singing substitute teacher, and a ticked-off Florida panther before they really begin to see the big picture. That's life in the swamp, kids. From the Hardcover edition.
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Dance of the Reptiles

Dance of the Reptiles

Carl Hiaasen

Literature & Fiction / Outdoors & Nature / Nonfiction

If you think the wildest, wackiest stories that Carl Hiaasen can tell have all made it into his hilarious, bestselling novels, think again. Dance of the Reptiles collects the best of Hiaasen’s Miami Herald columns, which lay bare the stories--large and small--that demonstrate anew that truth is far stranger than fiction. Hiaasen offers his commentary—indignant, disbelieving, sometimes righteously angry, and frequently hilarious—on burning issues like animal welfare, polluted rivers, and the broken criminal justice system as well as the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, Bernie Madoff's trial, and the shenanigans of the recent presidential elections. Whether or not you have read Carl Hiaasen before, you are in for a wild ride.
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Skink--No Surrender

Skink--No Surrender

Carl Hiaasen

Literature & Fiction / Outdoors & Nature / Nonfiction

Carl Hiaasen serves up his unique brand of swamp justice in the New York Times bestseller Skink—No Surrender. A National Book Award Longlist Selection   When your cousin goes missing under suspicious circumstances, who do you call? There’s only one man for the job: a half-crazed, half-feral, one-eyed ex-governor named Skink. Skink joins 14-year-old Richard on a breakneck chase across Florida, undaunted by lightning storms, poisonous snakes, flying bullets, and giant gators. There are a million places cousin Malley could be, a million unpleasant fates that might have befallen her, but one thing is certain: in the Florida swamp, justice is best served wild. SUNSHINE STATE AWARD FINALIST! From the Hardcover edition.
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Stormy Weather

Stormy Weather

Carl Hiaasen

Literature & Fiction / Outdoors & Nature / Nonfiction

When a ferocious hurricane rips through southern Florida, the con artists and carpetbaggers waste no time in swarming over the disaster area. Among the predators are Edie Marsh, an entrepreneurial young woman whose scheme to sleep with a Palm Beach Kennedy has fizzled, freezing her to concoct a colossal insurance rip-off; Lester Maddox Parsons, a murderous ex-con whose violent encounter with a game warden has left him with the fitting name of “Snapper”; and Avila, a crooked building inspector-turned-roofer who dabbles somewhat unsuccessfully in the occult.  Caught in the middle are Max and Bonnie Lamb, newlyweds torn in wildly different directions by the storm. It is Max’s fateful decision to abort their Disney World honeymoon and race to Dade County to see the terrible devastation. Armed with a video camera, the ambitious young advertising executive can’t wait to show his hurricane tapes to his buddies back in New York.  Over Bonnie’s objections, Max eagerly sets out through the rubble, debris and mayhem—and promptly vanishes. The only clue to his whereabouts: a runaway monkey. The only person who can help Bonnie’s search: a mysterious young man with a tranquilizer gun and a roomful of human skulls.  But there’s also a man called Skink who has devoted his very strange existence to saving Florida from the kinds of people blown in by the hurricane. It is he, crazed and determined, who prowls the swath of the storm and forever changes the lives of Max, Bonnie, Edie and the others. Their paths—tangled before they even know it—come together in a novel that continues the hilarious and scathing muckraking tradition that Carl Hiaasen has so mercilessly made his own. In Stormy Weather, there is no calm eye. BONUS: This edition includes an excerpt from Carl Hiaasen's Bad Monkey.
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Strip Tease

Strip Tease

Carl Hiaasen

Literature & Fiction / Outdoors & Nature / Nonfiction

Only in America could an innocent, if drunken, guest of honor at a strip joint bachelor party become a mortal threat against Big Money and Big Government. Only in south Florida, land of roadside honky-tonks and sinister pleasure boats—not to mention blackmail and murder—would a virtuous topless dancer join forces with a cool but clueless cop. And only in the fiction of Carl Hiaasen do readers experience riveting suspense and razor-sharp characters along with the most wicked humor imaginable. This is Strip Tease, Hiaasen’s most inventive tale yet of savage appetites and sweet justice. BONUS: This edition includes an excerpt from Carl Hiaasen's Bad Monkey.
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Team Rodent: How Disney Devours the World

Team Rodent: How Disney Devours the World

Carl Hiaasen

Literature & Fiction / Outdoors & Nature / Nonfiction

"Disney is so good at being good that it manifests an evil; so uniformly efficient and courteous, so dependably clean and conscientious, so unfailingly entertaining that it's unreal, and therefore is an agent of pure wickedness. . . . Disney isn't in the business of exploiting Nature so much as striving to improve upon it, constantly fine-tuning God's work." --from TEAM RODENT TEAM RODENT How Disney Devours America "Revulsion is good. Revulsion is healthy. Each of us has limits, unarticulated boundaries of taste and tolerance, and sometimes we forget where they are. Peep Land is here to remind us; a fixed compass point by which we can govern our private behavior. Because being grossed out is essential to the human experience; without a perceived depravity, we'd have nothing against which to gauge the advance or decline of culture; our art, our music, our cinema, our books. Without sleaze, the yardstick shrinks at both ends. Team Rodent doesn't believe in sleaze, however, nor in old-fashioned revulsion. Square in the middle is where it wants us all to be, dependable consumers with predictable attitudes. The message, never stated but avuncularly implied, is that America's values ought to reflect those of the Walt Disney Company, and not the other way around."
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