"Hey, at least I don't smell like a Dumpster at Woodstock...."

Anger can often inspire some of the best humor material ever written, as any savvy reader of satire can probably attest to. A well-written piece of satire, while often very funny on a superficial level, can often bring readers’ attention to extremely serious topics. Jonathan Swift, for instance, wrote in his 18th Century essay A Modest Proposal that the best way to solve Britain’s burgeoning political and social problems in Ireland was to use Irish babies as food. Swift’s point, of course, wasn’t to encourage infanticide or cannibalism, but to point out that Britain’s policies in the still-recently conquered Emerald Isle were doomed to fail if the issues of overpopulation and extreme poverty were not seriously taken into consideration by Parliament and the Crown.

On a somewhat more accessible level to general readers, Carl Hiaasen’s regular columns in the Miami Herald and set-in-weird-and-wacky Florida novels derive their humor from the author’s outright anger at the greedy developers, indifferent sugar farmers, and crooked lawyers and politicians that have contributed to the deliberate deterioration of the Sunshine State’s delicate environment. No big-shot legislator, no unscrupulous lobbyist, no corrupt public servant is safe from Hiaasen’s acerbic and often bitterly sardonic barbs.

One of the issues that causes Hiaasen’s blood to boil is the continuing destruction of the Florida Everglades, that shrinking remnant of Florida’s once thriving “River of Grass” which provides not only a habitat for alligators, egrets, anhinga, and the Florida panther but is also one of the sources of fresh water for South Florida’s growing human population. Most of the Everglades, which once covered half of the peninsula, have been drained and overdeveloped since Governor Napoleon B. Broward began “reclaiming” vast tracts of what was then simple swampland to urbanize the region. Now what little remains – most of it incorporated into Everglades National Park and a few other federally and state-operated parks and reserves – is being slowly but surely killed off by urban sprawl and environmentally hazardous runoff from the huge sugar companies’ farms and processing plants.

Skinny Dip, Hiaasen’s tenth work of fiction, is a mix of screwball comedy and a scathing look at the greedy “entrepreneurs” who, in order to make millions selling sugar, continue to pollute the Everglades even though there is a federally-mandated “$8 billion effort to save what remains.” From beautiful and remotely-located homes in Central Florida, millionaires such as Red Hammernut seek to get around the Save the Everglades court ordered clean-up by hiring easily corrupted and venal scientists and lawyers to help them say “Hey, our run-off is cleaner than baptismal water…and here are the figures to prove it!”

One of these willing low-life scientists is Dr. Charles “Chaz” Perrone, a marine biologist who, in the words of the back cover blurb, “can’t tell a seahorse from a sawhorse” and, indeed, hates getting wet. Diffident and not academically gifted (yet incredibly ambitious), Chaz has become one of Hammernut’s toadies, occasionally going out to the ‘Glades and taking water samples, often doctoring the evidence to make it seem as though Big Red’s farm runoff is in compliance with the new environmental rules.

And, as the beginning of Skinny Dip makes perfectly clear, Chaz is more than just greedy – he’s also a scumbag who will stop at nothing to keep earning Hammernut’s money…including murder.

In a stunning opening sequence, Hiaasen starts Skinny Dip with Chaz going through with his dastardly scheme to kill his beautiful wife Joey by throwing her off the cruise liner M.V. Sun Duchess. First he gets her tipsy with lots of wine, then, while up on the ship’s deck, he grabs her ankles and flips her backward over the rail. Splash. Bye-bye, Joey.

Unfortunately for Chaz, his lust for both Hammernut’s money and his mistress Ricca – not to mention his own intellectual limitations – mix with the adrenaline rush of pushing his wife overboard, and he forgets one crucial fact about Joey. In college, Joey had been a member of the swim team, and although she is stunned by the notion that Chaz has indeed tossed her over the ship’s rail, she survives the long drop into the Atlantic.

Saved by the most unlikely object – a floating bale of Jamaican marijuana – and using her expertise as a swimmer, a now-nude Joey makes her way to one of those small out-of-the-way islands east of Florida. There she’s brought ashore by Mick Stanahan, a fifty-something year-old ex-police officer who has been married six times and now lives in a beachside house with Strom, a Doberman pinscher.

Of course, Joey recovers physically from her involuntary skinny dip at sea, and of course she doesn’t simply want to find out why her no-good husband wants her dead – she wants to get even.

How does Joey get back at Chaz? Why, exactly, did he want her dead in the first place? Will Chaz be able to stay one step ahead of the police investigation into Joey’s seemingly fatal plunge into the ocean? Ah, I suppose I could tell you, but then that would take much of the fun away from reading this wacky, colorful, yet sometimes seriously insightful novel.

Like most journalists who delve into fiction, Hiaasen has a fine eye for detail and a good ear for dialogue. His characters are described not only by their physical traits (I can, for instance, picture Joey being played in a film version by Scarlett Johansen, say) but also by their defining personal quirks and flaws.

At heart Chaz Perrone was irrefutably a cheat and a maggot, but he had always shunned violence as dutifully as a Quaker elder. Nobody who knew him, including his few friends, would have imagined him capable of homicide. Chaz himself was somewhat amazed that he’d gone through with it.

When the alarm clock went off, he awoke with the notion that he’d imagined the whole scene. Then he rolled over and saw that Joey’s side of the bed was empty. Through the porthole he spied the jetties that marked the entrance of Port Everglades, and he knew he wasn’t dreaming. He had definitely killed his wife.

Chaz was dazzled by his own composure. He reached for the phone, made the call he’d been practicing and prepared himself for what was to come. He gargled lightly but otherwise made no attempt at personal grooming, dishevelment being expected of a frantic husband.

Although Hiaasen wants the reader to be aware of the serious matter of the killing of the Everglades, he is also adept at creating hiss-worthy villains, oddball characters such as Earl Edward “Tool” O’Toole, one of Hammernut’s underlings who, among other things, has a penchant for collecting those small homemade monuments for victims of car accidents in Florida’s highways and byways, and stalwart, charming, yet quirky heroes such as Mick Stranahan. It’s all a bit exaggerated, of course, but Skinny Dip is entertaining and often bitingly funny.