Fever Beach

Fever Beach leads us, in pure Hiaasen-style, into the depths of Florida at its most Floridian: a sun-soaked bastion of right-wing extremism, white power, greed, and corruption.Dale Figgo is the only hate-monger ever to be kicked out of the Proud Boys for being too dumb and incompetent. Now his already messy life is about to get more complicated, thanks to two formidable adversaries.The first is Viva Morales, a clever woman recently taken to the cleaners by her ex-husband, now working at the supposedly philanthropic Mink Foundation and renting a room in Figgo's apartment; the second, Twilly Spree, a millionaire with an anger management problem, especially when it comes to those who deface the environment.

"Hiaasen is working in a grand tradition that stretches back to Mikhail Bulgakov satirizing Stalinism and Charlie Chaplin mocking Hitler. At his best, he can pack a paragraph with so many little parodic bangs that it feels like a fireworks display when the explosions come so fast you stop saying “Ahhh” and just stand in slack-jawed bedazzlement…. While white-shoe lawyers, university presidents and media moguls cower before the MAGA assaults on American democracy and decency, this mischievous 72-year-old writer is fighting back with every political gag and sex joke he can get his hands on.” —Ron Charles, The Washington Post

"Carl Hiaasen’s Fever Beach turns, like many of his novels, on the actions of a collection of enthusiastic, comically unfocused malcontents....Mr. Hiaasen’s eye for the absurd, like his ear for dialogue, is as sharp as ever." — Anna Mundow, Wall Street Journal

"Fever Beach. . . features a witty, wounded hero with a heart of gold, boyish charm and profound anger at all despoilers of natural Florida. The author is each of those things, with a double dose of charm — but in real life he leaves the maiming, killing and vigilante butt-kicking to his alter egos, always in pursuit of righteous causes." —David Von Drehle, The Washington Post

"Nearly 40 years and 20-plus books later, what was happening to Florida is now happening to the entire country. The United States is being despoiled, corrupted, perverted, bulldozed into a playground for the wealthy. The archetype Hiaasen helped invent, the Florida Man, was once just an overconfident moron who, say, drowned while wrestling a gator for his beer. Now America is run by Florida Men. No satirist arrived at our dystopian moment better prepared than Carl Hiaasen. The bad guys in Hiaasen’s books have always been dangerous and mockable. These days they’re more dangerous than ever, and an infuriated Hiaasen mocks them just as viciously as they deserve —punishes them in ways that, thus far, the real world has been unable to do. At age 72, unexpectedly more relevant than he’s ever been, Carl Hiaasen is on a hot streak that rivals his early career. Fever Beach is among Hiaasen’s best novels, because it faces the horrors of our stupid times and portrays them in all their grotesquerie. . . . Forty years ago, Carl Hiaasen started writing novels because he was upset about what he saw happening to his own little corner of the world. These days, he might be the only writer mean enough, and funny enough, to chronicle what’s happening to us all." —Dan Kois, Slate

"Heavily plotted but peppily paced, bursting with quips and blazing with anger...” —Justin Taylor, The New York Times Book Review