Book Review: ‘Fever Beach,’ by Carl Hiaasen

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Book Review: ‘Fever Beach,’ by Carl Hiaasen

FEVER BEACH, by Carl Hiaasen

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The greater Miami area runs roughly 120 overdeveloped miles from Jupiter down to Homestead, but spans less than 30 at its widest point. This peninsula within a peninsula can claim its share of contemporary novelists, including Karen Russell, Tananarive Due, Jennine Capó Crucet and, for whatever it’s worth, yours truly, but it is perhaps best known for its proud tradition of crime writers: Charles Willeford, John D. MacDonald, Les Standiford, Edna Buchanan, Jeff Lindsay and Carl Hiaasen, whose scabrous, irascible, best-selling capers include “Strip Tease,” “Bad Monkey” and “Razor Girl.”

“Fever Beach,” Hiaasen’s latest, is set in the (fictional) coastal hamlet of Tangelo Shores, which as near as I can tell is somewhere on the Space Coast — a few hours north of his usual stomping grounds, which may explain the surprisingly scanty and generic scene-setting by a writer whose Florida bona fides ought to be beyond question.

The first character we meet is Dale Figgo, a hapless white nationalist kicked out of the Proud Boys after a viral video shows him smearing dog ****** on a statue of James Zachariah George, a Confederate general, during the Jan. 6 insurrection. It was an innocent mistake insofar as he thought he was defacing a statue of Ulysses S. Grant, but just as well: The Boys’ strict anti-masturbation policy had always (you might say) rubbed him the wrong way. Figgo, who works for a sex toy distributor, starts his own hate group, the Strokerz for Liberty, boosting product from the company warehouse to give as welcome gifts to new members. These details fairly represent the height of the novel’s stakes as well as its brow.

It’s fitting that a book dedicated to the memory of Jimmy Buffett would feature a cast of colorful weirdos and ne’er-do-wells working together (wittingly or otherwise) in a Floridian farce. Figgo’s wingman, Jonas Onus, dyes his beard the colors of the American flag and has a dog named Himmler. Figgo’s tenant, Viva Morales, is a Hispanic woman with progressive politics emblematized by her New Yorker subscription.

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