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Summary: If you've never read Hiaasen before, or even if you have...
Review: Hiaasen is a GENIUS! Tourist Season was my first Hiassen book, and it was a beautiful start to my Hiassen reading rage. Since Tourist Season, I've read 3 more by C.H., and I'm not done yet.Carl Hiaasen's style has always surprised me. Each one of his stories begins with what seems like many many separate, totally independent stories. Somehow, within a few hundred pages, each one of those stories become closely tied with every other one. Tourist Season had me laughing hysterically, more than any other Hiaasen book I think. Being a South Floridian, I've also traveled to most of the places described in this and other books. I find his depiction of the South Florida ecosystems splendid. Tourist Season especially evokes a genuine concern for the loss of Florida's natural land, and the final scene in the book is simply heart-wrenching. The perfect dose of humor coupled with a great look into natural Florida, away from Disney World and South Beach, I recommend Tourist Season to everyone, anywhere in the US. Definitely a good book to buy and keep forever.
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Summary: OFFBEAT NOT FUNNY
Review: I bought this book because it was supposed to be funny. I didn't find it funny at all. It was different and not bad--had a better plot than all the Grisham and Turow novels. Sure, the characters were offbeat--this isn't your usual mystery, but funny? No way. But then maybe I'm just missing the point. I think men would appreciate this author's style more than women would.
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Summary: Hiaasen is sooo mean, and sooo funny
Review: I found myself rooting for the crocodile. This book is very funny start to finish.
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Summary: It was pretty long
Review: I had to read this for a class, it's pretty long. I didnt finish the whole thing. The little I did read was funny as hell. Tampa Rules! Go Bucs!
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Summary: Hiaasen is funny
Review: i like him! hes funny! i love his books and im only in 8th grad
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Summary: A must-read for every Parrothead
Review: I thoroughly enjoyed the book on which Buffett's "The Ballad of Skip Wiley" was based.
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Summary: Great Idea
Review: I was surprised to see that Tourist Season was published almost 20 years ago. It is still a good read today and the issues are still the same: people coming to Florida to retire and die and people coming to Florida on vacation and exploiting the state and the natives.
For me, as a resident of Florida, Tourist Season resonated with my concerns. Tourism creates jobs but they are bad jobs. And despite the Everglades and opportunity for ecotourism, most tourists come to Florida to enter the brightly painted plastic and concrete world of Mickey. Retirees present longer lasting problems.
The title "Tourist Season" is a clever pun on one group of concerned citizens' plan to deal with tourism. In an attempt to reduce Florida's image as one big happy sunshiny beach they being a series of planned attacks on tourism. The idea is to scare off the tourists to protect Florida's ecosystem and economy. Killings and kidnappings are the plan of attack. What seems like an obvious warning to the anti-tourist revolutionaries - a dismembered city official covered in sunscreen and placed in a suitcase with a rubber alligator in his mouth - is written off by police as an oddity and not a political message.
Tourist Season follows an ex-reporter's attempt to find the killers and the killers' attempt to get the press to notice what they are doing so that tourists and retirees will stay out of Florida. It is entertaining and cleverly written. If you aren't Florida and even if you are the constant environmentalist messages may bother you. Hiassen definitely has a one issue approach for why tourists are bad.
Tourist Season is full of dark humor that still resonates today.
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Summary: If you enjoy dark humor, you'll like this book
Review: I was told by a number of people that I would love this author's books, but in this one at least, I personally found the humor too dark at times for my taste. There's something creepy about mixing humor with people getting killed in grisly ways.
That having been said, substantial parts of this book are very funny, and it's well-written. It holds your attention well even though you kind of know what's happening (unlike most mysteries).
Set in Miami, the book begins with a dead tourist and then another one. The Chamber of Commerce is desperate to hush this up because they don't want a few tourist killings to hurt Miami tourism. A former newspaper reporter, disillusioned and now a private investigator, manages to get mixed up in this and suspects he knows who is responsible. He sets out to find the killer and protect the innocent -- a young woman he fears is in harm's way.
This isn't really much of a mystery, certainly not the kind of murder mystery you might expect -- you know early on who is doing it and even why, but the book tells of the attempts to find and capture them. Concern for the environment of South Florida sometimes starts to grate (at least it did for me -- I have absolutely no control of what happens to the Everglades so why is he lecturing me?)
The humor is sophisticated, but a lot of people really love this author. He has a cult following, and it's worth checking him out to see if you agree. As for me, I'm not entirely sure I'd read more books by him, but I haven't ruled it out.
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Summary: Highly Entertaining
Review: I won't reveal much of the plot here, as there are some twists and turns, some more predictable than others. The story is about a group of terrorists who try to make Florida unappealing to tourists and retirees so they leave in droves. And they attempt to achieve this goal by having a few dead bodies turn up. I found this to be a very entertaining book, with interesting characters, and a plot that moves briskly along through a number of twists and turns. The leader of the terrorist group is more interesting than the hero. I found his heart in the right place, even though his methods had a lot to be desired. He is smart and cunning, yet unbalanced enough to keep you constantly cringing that something really bad is about to happen. The villain steals the show, but the other characters are interesting enough to flesh out the story. This was my first book by Hiaasen, who was highly recommended by friends, and it certainly will not be my last.
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Summary: Hiassen's first book, and one of his strongest
Review: I've been reading Carl Hiassen's work for years, having jumped in around the middle, with "Native Tongue," "Skin Tight" and "Striptease." I've more recently been working my way through the rest of his catalog, including "Stormy Weather" and "Double Whammy," with his two latest books in hardback waiting on my to-be-read shelf. But years after the liner notes for a Jimmy Buffett song ("The Ballad of Skip Wiley and Skeet" off his "Barometer Soup" album) made me go look for this Hiassen's guy's works in a book store, I'm finally getting around to "Tourist Season," the first novel Hiassen wrote, featuring rogue newspaper columnist Skip Wiley. It's said that you spend your entire life writing your first novel, as you inevitably put pretty much all the good stuff in that one. Whatever the state of your craft, it's where your ideas, your good bits, your passion all gets poured into. While I've enjoyed other Hiassen books more (notably "Native Tongue" and "Skin Tight"), this certainly seems to be true for "Tourist Season." While all of his books have an overt current of rage directed at developers, destructive big business and endemic corruption, he always makes sure to leaven that with humor, a little zaniness, and some sweetness. Not here. Sure, there's some amusing bits, a lot of them, really, but Hiassen's subsequent work has never been this dark, his rage never so undiminished. While all of his books barrel towards their climax, this is the first one I've read in which it's hard to see how there could be a happy ending, where the bad guys aren't REALLY bad and where it doesn't all seem like cosmic justice on the last page. I won't spoil the ending, but by midway through the book, it's clear that with the heaping handfuls of moral ambiguity mixed in, it's hard to have anything better than a bittersweet ending. In a nutshell, Miami newspaper columnist Skip Wiley has had enough. Enough of the influx of Yankees to Florida and the concomitant woes of greed, development and reckless destruction of the environment. Especially the latter. When Skip Wiley goes missing, and a new terrorist organization, the Nights of December, starts targeting the tourist industry in South Florida (starting by shoving a rubber alligator down a man's throat and then putting his dead body inside his luggage), Skip's editor calls a former reporter turned private investigator to track him down. Hiassen almost certainly does not advocate terrorism, murder and kidnap, but the cause is clearly near and dear to him, and he argues the Nights' cause eloquently. That makes their extremism tragic, and the possible endings all troubling. A solid novel, and one of Hiassen's best. While all of his novels will make you laugh, and keep you turning the pages, anxious to see what the next twist in the roller-coaster ride will be, "Tourist Season" will make you think, too. Definitely recommended for any of his existent fans, as well as fans of Dave Barry or Elmore Leonard.
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