Carl Hiassen is back with another tale of vice, corruption and cosmic justice in South Florida. Chaz Perrone dumps his wife Joey off a cruise liner during their anniversary cruise because he thinks - paranoid fool that he is - she has caught on to the fact that he is faking water quality test results to conceal pollution of the Everglades by a corporate farmer who is bribing Chaz. She survives the fall and her dip in Gulf Stream by grabbing a passing bale of marijuana. She drifts near the island home of one of Hiassen's recurrent characters, the reclusive ex-detective Mick Stranahan. Joey gets her revenge by haunting and teasing her husband, and Mick is along for the ride. Meanwhile, corporate crook Red Hammernut appoints a brutish farm crew boss named Tool as Chaz's bodyguard and minder. Tool is wandering around with a bullet lodged in his ass, stealing pain control patches from nursing home residents and collecting roadside memorial crosses from the sites of car wrecks. Hiassen brings back, from his earlier novels, the character of the swamp-dwelling ex-Governor, a one-eyed mad King for a couple of scenes.

It's a typical Hiassen mystery-comedy. While Hiassen claims to write in the tradition of John D. MacDonald, the resemblance is thin. Stranahan vaguely follows the lifestyle of Travis McGee, and Hiassen rants about overdevelopment and corruption, but the comparisons stop there. Hiassen writes in an omniscient third person voice. He tells the reader, in wonderfully comic detail, but with little subtlety, what his characters are doing and thinking. His characters are not prone to reflection. Even his nice characters are a blend of banality and narcissism, with few insights into the forces moving them.

Hiassen has several real strengths. He writes bizarre crooks. He writes his crooks like Elmore Leonard, with a sense of why these people don't think and act like normal people. He writes with moral force, with the blended sense of righteous outrage and cynicism that we have seen in American journalism since Ambrose Bierce. He looks at life through the warped sight of characters devoted to money and sex, or the dim sight of thuggish brutes like Tool - who becomes more of a wandering Fool than villain. He is outrageously, vulgarly funny.

On the other hand, this is not one of his better books, and his writing has become a little predicable. The frantic pace and the loud noise drown any subtleties. He is indifferent to plot development, relying on pace and the momentum of the action and a host of improbable coincidences to carry the story. His crooks are too funny to be frightening which waters down the suspense and dilutes the force of his moral judgments. It's an entertaining book, but definitely light, more light comedy than dark comedy or mystery.