Greg's Reviews > Skin Tight

Simply put, "Miami Vice on Steroids." There are not many authors who can deliver a 400+ page comic crime mystery, (Tim Dorsey does it in about half the length and both authors set their work in Florida) who can throw the ball up in the air on page one and keep it spinning. Hiaasen goes for it, and I almost gave this one a 4-star rating (it's a wild-ass blast), as I read the whole thing between Sunday afternoon and this morning (oh, remember back in the day, Saturday Night Fever and then an all-day Sunday recovery instead of reading?), but the author has a tendency to take his jokes a bit too far, perhaps to a condescending level. "Reynaldo disliked the cordless clip-on microphones; he favored the old baton-style mikes....Christina Marks called it Reynaldo's "phallic attachment." Okay, fine, got the joke. But Hiaasen wants to make sure we get it, so he adds, "She postulated that, in Reynaldo's mind, the microphone had become a substitute for his penis." Hence Hiassen takes us needlessly from maybe 350 pages to over 400. It's fascinating to behold how Hiaasen gets people naked, a lot, here, but then again this book is about skin (well, rather, the extreme pitfalls of cosmetic surgery). I like this Mick Stranahan guy who lives in a stilted house out in the tidal flats of South Florida as he reminds me of Travis McGee who lives on a boat in a marina also in South Florida. So Hiaasen, like Dorsey, takes the MacDonald/McGee style crime thriller into much weirder, much wilder plots. More sex, more unbelievable, over-the-top capers doesn't make for work better than MacDonald. But still, it's pretty much all fun stuff (but Dorsey takes the violence to a level I don't particularly like) and Hiaasen has the good sense to, indeed, reference that 1980s TV show, Miami Vice. And, yes, I'll have at least one more Stranahan adventure.