8 Rollicking and Rambunctious Mysteries by Carl Hiaasen

The hit-and-run slaying of an ex-girlfriend by a carload of drug dealers leads law-abiding architect Chris Meadows deep into the early 1980s Florida cocaine wars—an era of shoulder pads and speed boats.

Pretty soon, his quest for justice has become a battle for survival in a world of twisted hitmen and venal law enforcers who can’t seem to decide between taking a pay-off to whack him, or using the mild-mannered Meadows as a piece of live bait.

A hard-hitting, taut thriller co-penned with fellow Miami Herald reporter, Bill Montalbano.

Hiaasen and Montalbano worked together on three tough-as-cheap-steak crime mysteries in the 1980s.

In this, the second of them, Key West fishing boat skipper, Breeze Albury reluctantly falls in with the Cuban and Colombian drug smugglers who cut his trap lines and destroy his business.

Helping them ship cocaine is his only way out, but when he’s arrested by a sleazy local police chief and his employers start to wonder about his loyalty, things take a mega-violent turn.

The final book in the Hiaasen/Montalbano trilogy departs from the familiar, sweat-soaked southern Florida locale and moves the action to communist China during the days of Deng Xiaoping—a time when the population of the Chinese capital still wore Mao jackets and mainly travelled by bicycle.

Our hero is Tom Stratton, an art professor with a dark past in Military Intelligence black ops in Vietnam. When Stratton’s war buddy, David Wang turns up dead while the pair are visiting Peking (as Beijing was still known back then), he determines to find out who was behind it, before they kill him, too.

Stratton will need all his old skills to survive in an alien country ruled by a brutal totalitarian regime.

Hiaasen’s first solo novel established him as the go-to guy for bizarre-yet-weirdly-believable Florida crime.

It’s hard to think of any other mystery writer who would come up with a plot that involves environmental protestors feeding tourists to a giant alligator as a means of stopping condominiums encroaching into the Everglades.

Or one who could make that plot into both a page-turning thriller and an outrageously funny comic novel. Hiaasen does both.

The novel that introduced Hiaasen’s struggling Key West cop, Andrew Yancey, a police officer with such an unconventional approach to law enforcement that he’s got a potential murder victim’s severed arm in his deep freeze.

Sorting the details of that crime out while dealing with a voodoo witch who’s blinding her boyfriends, a thrusting real estate agent with eyes on illegal land deals, and the dispossessed citizens of an offshore island are tough enough.

But Yancy also finds himself embroiled in a romance with a kinky medical examiner and fending off the attentions of Driggs, the naughty capuchin primate of the title.

Any mystery novel that is set in the outlandish world of competitive largemouth bass fishing is bound to be a little unusual.

In the hands of Hiaasen, the setting is just part of a satirical romp through a world of trailer parks, TV evangelism, pit bulls, and casting rods.

 Featuring down-at-heel private eye, R.J. Decker, Hiaasen’s book fizzes with jokes, and he populates the steamy landscape of his home state with characters who are so much larger than life they could stamp all over Miami like King Kong.

A novel that starts with former state investigator Mick Stranahan knocking off a mysterious intruder with the aid of a stuffed marlin head, and runs merrily along from there.

Skin Tight centres on the nefarious activities of Florida society plastic surgeon, Dr Graveline. The highly unqualified quack seems to be leading a gilded life, providing nips and tucks to the wealthy citizens of the Sunshine State.

However, Stranahan links his would-be hitman to tales of malpractice and upcoming exposure on a TV talk show by a billboard lawyer and is soon threatening the doctor’s lucrative livelihood. Inventive and darkly hilarious mayhem ensues.

Hiaasen penned this typically wild and crazy tale while working as a columnist for the Miami Herald.

Set in south Florida and featuring a cast of characters that include turtle-worshipping evangelicals, a homicidal judge and a statue of The Madonna that weeps perfumed tears, Lucky You centres on the attempts of reporter Tom Krone and his girlfriend JoLayne Lucks to retrieve her stolen jackpot-winning state lottery ticket from a clutch of glue-sniffing white supremacists.

Only Hiaasen could make the whole thing hang together so superbly.