Razor Girl

I've been pretty loyal to Carl Hiassen. I think I've read all of his books for adults, all of them comic thrillers about stupid criminals in Florida. But I noticed in his last book, Bad Monkey, he'd lost something off his fastball, and his latest Razor Girl, continues that trend. He's shooting at fish in a barrel.

Namely, he's parodying reality shows. "The election of a black president brought a boom in TV reality shows featuring feisty rednecks, and talent scouts began scouring the Dixie belt in a fevered search for the next Duck Dynasty franchise." A fellow much like Phil Robertson from Duck Dynasty, Buck Nance, is in Key West for a personal appearance. He's the star of a show called Bayou Brethren, which is about a family of hillbilly chicken farmers (in reality, Buck is an accordion player from Wisconsin). He makes some off-color remarks about black and gay people, and runs for his life.

That's just one subplot. The main plot, sort of, is the young lady of the title, Merry Mansfield. The book begins this way: "On the first day of February, sunny but cold as a frog’s balls, a man named Lane Coolman stepped off a flight at Miami International, rented a mainstream Buick and headed south to meet a man in Key West. He nearly made it."

He gets rear-ended by Merry, who was distracted by shaving her cooch while driving. Actually, she's part of an insurance scam to bump drivers, but has been hired out to kidnap Coolman, who is Buck's agent, but they've got the wrong man. So begins the merry-go-round that ends up involving Andrew Yancy, a former detective busted to restaurant inspector, who wants back on the force and tries to solve the case of the missing Buck Nance.

No Hiassen book would be complete without a very stupid villain, and in Razor Girl there is a doozy nicknamed Blister. "Spending time with Benny the Blister had shaken Buck Nance’s confidence in the superiority of the white male.." Blister has killed a Muslim tourist, thinking he was ISIS, and kidnaps Buck and Coolman in an effort to get on the show. This involves the big agency in L.A., and of course Hiassen portrays these people as amoral and avaricious, but this is nothing new--agents have never been potrayed as heroic.

Hiassen also throws in the Mafia. As I mentioned in my review of Wonder Wheel, including the Mafia in a story like this is a cheat, like "it was all a dream." The Mafia in literature have become an omnipotent yet humorous way to deal with pesky things. Want to get rid of a problem? Befriend a mafioso. But don't cross him!

So Razor Girl is a little tired, but still readable. The character of Merry, while clearly a male fantasy, is fun, as is the depiction of the Keys in all their glory: '“Hey!” Richardson called after him. “Don’t forget to send me those pictures of your rash!' Only on Duval Street would such a line fail to turn any heads."