Model Citizen

“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 is missing, and from there Carl Hiaasen’s newest twisting-and-turning novel takes off. It’s a greed-swamped world of cons, grifters, rich snobs, halfhearted thugs, and a handful of wrung-out do-gooders—in other words, it’s Hiaasen’s Florida.

Among the rowdy cast: 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 only of the insurance payout.; Zester—Jonny’s partner in a GoFundMe ripoff called FloatMyWorld, designed to separate innocent donors from their life savings. Zester once worked proudly for Elon Musk at the Department of Government Efficiency in Washington, and skipped away with the Social Security numbers of thousands of potential new victims. There’s also Bernie Lobo—one of Jonny and Zester’s victims who, at age 74 and on a fixed income, discovers  cocaine and strippers; Ovie McNaught—found hiding in the attic of a mini-mansion where he’s mistaken for a  raccoon; Jake Dent—claustrophobic  investigator for the State Attorney in Key West; a comedy improv team-turned-Russian mobsters;  a side-hustling mortician, a Bahamian police constable determined to find out what really happened to Jonny Flute, the shady American who vanished on his foil board , 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 agent, Paul Ryskamp, and, best of all, Skink, an ex-governor of Florida and vengeful defender of all things wild.

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