Scott Rhee's Reviews > Skin Tight

If you believe that Florida is the sewer where a majority of the country's human waste ends up, you'll love Carl Hiaasen.

A former police reporter for the Miami Herald, Hiaasen clearly has a love-hate relationship with the state he resides in.

Mostly hate. But he shares his vitriol with a smile and laughter.

It is hard not to laugh at the inanity of most of the criminals in his books.

In "Skin Tight", for example, an incompetent hit-man loses an arm from a barracuda attack, and instead of attaching a prosthetic arm, he decides to have a weed-whacker attached. So, for the rest of the book, he's walking around with a weed-whacker as a limb. Priceless.

Okay, so if you don't find humor in that, Hiaasen may not be for you, but if it brings even the slightest twinge of a smile to your face, please do yourself the favor and read a Carl Hiaasen book.

"Skin Tight" starts off with a typical Hiaasen character, Mick Stranahan, a former cop who just wants to enjoy his privacy on a deserted island in the Keys, killing a mafia hit-man by stabbing him through the heart with a blue marlin. From there, the story just gets wonderfully crazy.

As in all Hiaasen books, there is an enormous cast of characters, ranging from a Geraldo Rivera-like TV reporter who actually tries to get beaten up on every episode by his guests, a plastic surgeon who is so bad at his job that even he doesn't want to perform surgeries, as well as the afore-mentioned weed-whacker-for-a-hand assassin who desperately needs a dermabrasion.

And, as in all Hiaasen books, there is plenty of hilarious social commentary. In "Skin Tight", Hiaasen takes aim at the plastic surgery industry, and he gives it a new a--hole. Funny, exciting, relevant, entertaining stuff. (Unless you're a plastic surgeon, in which case, you may not like it...)