Simply put, it can be described as "Miami Vice on Steroids." There are few authors who are capable of presenting a comic crime mystery that spans over 400 pages. (Tim Dorsey manages to do it in about half the length, and both authors set their works in Florida.) They can throw the ball up in the air right on page one and keep it spinning. Hiaasen attempts this, and I almost gave this one a 4-star rating. (It's a wild and exciting read.) I finished reading the whole thing between Sunday afternoon and this morning. (Oh, remember the old days when it was Saturday Night Fever and then an all-day Sunday recovery instead of reading?) However, 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, I got the joke. But Hiaasen wants to make sure we really understand it, so he adds, "She postulated that, in Reynaldo's mind, the microphone had become a substitute for his penis." As a result, Hiassen needlessly extends the book from maybe 350 pages to over 400. It's fascinating to see how Hiaasen gets people naked frequently in this book. Then again, this book is about the extreme pitfalls of cosmetic surgery. I like this Mick Stranahan character who lives in a stilted house in the tidal flats of South Florida. He reminds me of Travis McGee who lives on a boat in a marina also in South Florida. So, like Dorsey, Hiaasen takes the MacDonald/McGee style crime thriller into much weirder and wilder plots. More sex and more unbelievable, over-the-top capers don't necessarily make it better than MacDonald's work. But still, it's mostly all fun stuff. (Although 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 definitely have at least one more Stranahan adventure.