8 July, 2001: Skin Tight
The first Carl Hiassen book I read, Tourist Season, was charming -- an Elmore Leonard novel by way of Dave Barry, about a crazed man's attempt to scare tourists out of Florida. I had high hopes for Skin Tight, but it just kind of lay there like a leaden blob. The culture of body worship might have made for an amusing lark for a comic crime novel -- I'd have enjoyed Donald Westlake's take on it, I think -- but Hiassen seems to have realized that he didn't have enough material to make for that book and welded on some characters from a different book. The protagonist is a laconic Vietnam Vet with a streak of violence and a bad habit of marrying coctail waitresses; the evil plastic surgeon's chief stooge is a seven-footer whose face is a mass of scar tissue (the result of plastic surgery gone awry, natch) named "Chemo." Other, similarly cringeworthy touches abound. This book was a big sloppy mess that burnt through the goodwill Hiassen had earned with Tourist Season; I'm not actually sure that I want to read Big Numbers now.