(Think about it.) The nice thing about wheelchairs, he explains, is that they don't have license plates.Īfter the birth of their daughter, Angela, Erin leaves the hopeless Darrell and supports herself as a clerk in the local F.B.I. Wheelchairs, a growth industry in Florida. It isn't until she's married and pregnant that she learns the truth Darrell was working as an orderly only to further his real career: drug addict and thief. Partly to get away from her pestiferous mother - where have we heard that before? - and partly because Darrell Her presence, her history and goals, make the cartoon nastiness around her less cartoony and more nasty than in previous Hiaasen novels.Įrin is visiting her mother in the hospital when she meets Darrell Grant, the cheerful, fast-talking orderly who will soon ask her to marry him. This time, in among his freaks and obsessives, his corrupters and corrupted, his brain-dead and his frenetically active, the author has dropped a real honest-to-God human being, an appealing This novel could be dangerous to your ribs. Wrapped in so many comic bells and whistles that your sides hurt after a while, just from reading. Hiaasen doing it again, which is fine, bringing us in fiction the unpalatable truths that nonfiction is too polite to mention, and doing it hilariously, his harsh judgments and cold-eyed observations In that respect, 'Strip Tease' is simply Mr. Not surprisingly, he finds none of it sweet. This time out, his unforgiving gaze roves from the sleazier depths of 'adult' entertainment through law enforcement as Realpolitik to governmentally price-supported In his first four novels, he studied Florida's sunny putrefaction from a range of perspectives, casting a jaundiced eye over big-money fishing contests, theme amusement parks, wildlife preservation scams, developmental sprawl, cosmetic plastic surgeryĪnd the more predatory aspects (believe me) of the tourist industry. He may be God's way of telling Florida it's gone too far. Leonard, describing a Florida similar to theirs but worse, more corrupt, more lost to hope.

When he switches from journalism to the writing of novels, he becomes a kind of cross between Dave Barry and Elmore Leonard, tougher than $21.ĬARL HIAASEN is an investigative reporter for The Miami Herald, which may be why he has such a disdain for reality.

The New York Times: Book Review Search ArticleĪugust 29, 1993, Sunday, Late Edition - Final

Strip tease by carl hiaasen