Model Citizen

From the bestselling author of Fever Beach comes a hilarious, razor-sharp Florida adventure about a swindler's sudden disappearance and the madcap cast of characters looking to solve and cash in on it.

"On the first calm Monday in January, a man named Jonny Flute mounted a blue-and-silver foil board, waved toward the pink beach, where his unimpressed girlfriend lay sunning, and in a quest of an epic selfie went speeding off to pester a pool of dolphins." Hours later, Jonny Flute’s foil board is recovered, Jonny Flute is missing, presumed dead, and Carl Hiaasen’s newest, hilarious, crazy, twisting-and-turning novel is off and running. It’s a greed-dominated world of cons, grifters, rich snobs, killers and, the handful of much-needed do-gooders — in other words, it’s Hiaasen’s Florida.

Among the compelling cast of characters: Risa Fawn—Flute’s girlfriend (for all of a couple of months), a bikini-wearing influencer who claims to have 300,000 followers (it’s more like 3,000) and professes to be Flute’s wife, thinking there is big-time insurance money to be had; Zester—Jonny’s partner in a bogus company, FloatMyWorld, set up to bilk its victims out of their life savings. Zester worked for Elon Musk at the Department of Government Efficiency in Washington and used their access to Social Security information to find FloatMyWorld’s customers/suckers. There is also Bernie Lobo—one of Jonny and Zester’s victims who, at age 74 and on a fixed income, discovered his love for cocaine and strippers; Ovie McNaught—found hiding in the attic of a Palm Beach millionaire, hoping people think he’s a raccoon; Jake Dent—upright investigator for the State Attorney’s office; Russian hit men; a Bahamian police constable determined to find out what happened to Jonny Flute; corrupt veterinarians, and more. Happily, the “more” includes the return of Angie Armstrong, wildlife relocation specialist and the heroine of Squeeze Me, her ex-boyfriend and ex-FBI bigwig, Paul Ryskamp, and, best of all, Skink, ex-governor of Florida and protector of all things ecological.

This is Hiaasen at his best, which is as good as it gets.