For once, the characters are funnier than their exhaustingly unpredictable interactions. The result is less satire than...
Hiaasen’s latest heroine is mad as hell, at least when she’s off her meds, and she’s not going to take it anymore.
When a telemarketer who’s interrupted dinner with her son Fry to peddle waterlogged Florida real estate responds to her gentle reproof with obscenities, Honey Santana, deciding he needs to be taught a lesson, sets out to entice Boyd Shreave to the Everglades to give him a taste of his own medicine. She lures both Boyd and his colleague and mistress Eugenie Fonda to Dismal Key, where she proposes to give them a comprehensive immersion in unspoiled Florida. For better or worse, though, she’s picked a week when Dismal Key is overrun with other loonies. Sammy Tigertail has come at the behest of the late Jeter Wilson, whose spirit has been nagging him (“This was the worst vacation I ever had”) ever since Sammy dumped his body into an obliging swamp. Theodore Dealey is a private eye hoping to get photos of Boyd and Eugenie in flagrante for Boyd’s wife, whose interest in the affair has gone way beyond divorce. Louis Piejack, the rancid ex-boss who groped Honey and lived to regret the sequel, is positive she has the hots for him. Perry Skinner, vice mayor of Everglades City, takes a proprietary interest in both Honey, since he used to be her husband, and Fry, since he used to be his father. Members of the First Resurrectionist Maritime Assembly for God are waiting for the Messiah to make landfall. FSU undergraduate Gillian St. Croix, who just wants to have fun, is about the only cast member to get her wish.
For once, the characters are funnier than their exhaustingly unpredictable interactions. The result is less satire than usual from Hiaasen (Skinny Dip, 2004, etc.), and more Rube Goldberg farce.Pub Date: Nov. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-26299-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2006
Utter non-scents.
Die-hard Yankee candle maker Stella Wright (Murder’s No Votive Confidence, 2018) gets caught up in a trans-Atlantic murder plot.
Stella thoroughly enjoys her trip to Paris even though her mother, perfume expert Millie Wright, who’s scheduled to speak on a panel entitled “The Art of Scent Extractions” at the World Perfumery Conference, gets preempted by a murder. Sadly, once they’re back home in Nantucket, things get even weirder. Stella receives an anonymous note threatening her mom if Stella doesn’t turn over a secret formula hidden in Millie’s bag. Her mom can’t help because she’s in the hospital courtesy of an overenthusiastic attempt by Stella’s cat, Tinker, to befriend her. While trespassing on a suspicious sailboat, Stella meets U.S. Agent Sarah Hill, who warns her that well-known anarchist Rex Laruam plans to disrupt the upcoming Peace Jubilee using a stolen formula he secreted in Millie’s bag after he stabbed the agent guarding it back in Paris. Ignoring the advice of her friend Andy Southerland, a Nantucket cop, to leave detection to the professionals, Stella tries to unmask the elusive Laruam. As she spies on a bevy of unlikely suspects, the plot spirals further and further out of control: There’s a Canadian couple staying at an Airbnb run by Stella’s cousin Chris who whisper sweet but suspicious nothings in the dark, a shovel-wielding schoolmarm, a gang of old geezers who have a collective crush on Millie, a surprise 30th-birthday party planned by Stella’s beau, Peter Bailey, and an even more surprising impromptu airplane ride.
Utter non-scents.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4967-2141-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
A middling mystery with telling historical details and the usual pleasures provided by the regulars’ interpersonal dynamics.
A plucky group of early-20th-century detectives (Murder on Trinity Place, 2019, etc.) takes on the Black Hand.
The leads include Frank Malloy and Gino Donatelli, former police officers who started a detective agency after an unexpected legacy made Malloy a wealthy man; Malloy’s wife, Sarah, the daughter of a wealthy society family who runs a maternity clinic for the poor; and their nanny, Maeve, a budding sleuth who works in Malloy’s office. All of them leap to attention when Gino’s sister-in-law Teodora reports that Jane Harding, a worker at the settlement house where Teo volunteers, has been kidnapped by the Black Hand, who are notorious for abducting the wives and children of anyone who can afford to pay ransom. The New York Police Department is corrupt, and the local Italian immigrants never report crimes. Mr. McWilliam, who runs the settlement house, had asked Jane to marry him, but she’d asked him to allow her to experience more of the single life before deciding. Seeking clues, Sarah visits Mrs. Cassidi, an earlier kidnapping victim who’s refused to talk to anyone, in hopes that her nursing experience and sympathetic manner will get results. Mrs. Cassidi admits to being raped but knows little about where she was held captive, a quiet place in a house where she could hear children. Soon after Nunzio Esposito, a leader of the Black Hand, tells Malloy that no one’s been taken from the settlement house, Jane suddenly reappears but refuses to discuss where she’s been. Lisa Prince, Jane’s well-to-do cousin, reluctantly agrees to take her in even though Jane’s jealous of her wealth and can be unpleasant to deal with. When Esposito’s found murdered in a flat he rented for his mistress, Gino, who’s just arrived on the scene, is arrested. Now the clever sleuths must solve both the murder and the abductions to clear Gino’s name.
A middling mystery with telling historical details and the usual pleasures provided by the regulars’ interpersonal dynamics.Pub Date: April 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-0574-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Berkley Prime Crime
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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