Carl Hiaasen's characters ride and flail on little verbal hurricanes, and his literary storm shows no signs of dying down. Sick Puppy shares Dave Barry's giddy gift for finding humor in South Florida horrors, and a bit of Elmore Leonard's genius for pitch-perfect dialogue spouted smartly by criminals who are dumb as stumps. The title of Hiaasen's eighth novel could apply to most of its characters, but it chiefly refers to an ebullient Labrador retriever named Boodle and the millionaire eco-terrorist Twilly Spree. Let's just say that Twilly has a singular affliction: poor anger management in the face of environmental irresponsibility. When he spots Boodle's owner, Palmer Stoat, tossing litter from a car, Twilly goes to Stoat's home and removes the glass eyeballs from the animals that the bloated lobbyist had shot and mounted on his walls. Boodle gulps down the eyeballs, sustaining no small amount of digestive difficulties.

Soon Boodle and Stoat's wife, Desie, are fugitives from Florida's nature despoilers (who include the Governor, a "gladhanding maggot," the amusingly slimy Stoat, the human bulldozer Krimmler, the cocaine-importer-turned-developer Clapley, and the hit man Mr. Gash, who's fond of sex with multiple beach bimbos in iguana-skin sex harnesses to the tunes of The World's Most Blood Curdling Emergency Calls). Desie, who has a knack for calamitous romance, is smitten with Twilly, but urges him not to kill any litterbugs or pelican molesters: "Jail would not be good for this relationship." What keeps pure farce at bay in a novel that romps with the abandon of a scent-crazed Labrador is the otherwise charming Twilly's creepy edge of implacable fanaticism. And what redeems the funny/ugly violence from cliché is its colorful bad guys (they're as iridescent as oil slicks), Hiaasen's excellent wit, and the music of his prose. To evoke a drunk asleep on the beach, he adds a pungent detail: "a gleaming stellate dollop of seagull shit decorated his forehead."

Hiaasen is not unflawed. His original eco-terrorist character, ex-Florida governor Clinton "Skink" Tyree, seems like an interloper from the earlier books. But Hiaasen's the master of madcap ensembles (which is partly why the star-vehicle film of his fine book Strip Tease flopped). And even when you can see a chase scene's denouement coming for a beachfront mile, each paragraph packs descriptive delights to keep you going at breakneck pace. --Tim Appelo


From Publishers Weekly
Florida muckraker Hiaasen once again produces a devilishly funny caper revolving around the environmental exploitation of his home state by greedy developers. When budding young ecoterrorist Twilly Spree begins a campaign of sabotage against a grotesque litterbug named Palmer Stoat, he gets much more than he bargained for. Stoat is a political fixer, involved with a bevy of shady types: Dick Artemus, ex-car salesman, now governor; Robert Clapley, a crooked land developer with an unhealthy interest in Barbie dolls; and his business expediter, Mr. Gash, a permed reptilian thug with ghastly musical tastes: "All morning he drove back and forth across the old bridge, with his favorite 911 compilation in the tape deck: Snipers in the Workplace, accompanied by an overdub of Tchaikowsky's Symphony No. 3 in D Major." After a wave of preemptive strikes centered on a garbage truck and a swarm of dung beetles, Twilly ups the ante and kidnaps both Palmer's dog and his wife, Desie, who finds Twilly a great deal more interesting than her slob of a husband. In doing so Twilly uncovers a conspiracy (well, more like business as usual) to jam a bill through the Florida legislature to develop Toad Island, a wildlife sanctuary, in a deal that will make a mint for all the politicos concerned. Chapley wants Twilly silenced and dispatches Mr. Gash. Palmer wants his wife and dog back and asks Dick Artemus to help in the rescue without derailing the bill. Who should be called upon but the good cop/bad psycho duo of Trooper Jim Tile and ex-Governor Clinton Tyree, aka Skink or the Captain, whose recurring appearances throughout Hiaasen's novels have made for hysterical farce. While there may be nothing laughable about unchecked environmental exploitation, Hiaasen has refined his knack for using this gloomy but persistent state of affairs as a prime mover for scams of all sorts. In Sick Puppy, he shows himself to be a comic writer at the peak of his powers. 200,000 first printing; first serial to Men's Journal; Literary Guild alternate; simultaneous audiobook. (Jan.) Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
In typical Hiaasen fashion, this story involves corrupt, crazed, and powe-hungry Florida politicians accidentally pitted against quirky but innocent individuals. Twilly Spree is trying to save Florida from litterers, so when state lobbyist Palmer Stoat starts throwing trash from his Range Rover, he is incensed. The next time Stoat and his wife go out to dinner, Spree buries their BMW convertible in trash, but this fails to reform him. In continuing to pursue Stoat, Spree uncovers a pork barrel deal that will transform wild Toad Island into Sheerwater Resort. To stop the project Spree kidnaps the Stoats' family dog. The mayhem that follows includes kinky sex, bulldozers, hit men, a big game hunt, and an ex-governor turned ecoterrorist. In the end, good triumphs over evil. Hiaasen's hijinks are outrageous, unbelievable, and thought-provoking. The worrysome grains of truth and reality in the story give pause. Masterfully read by Edward Asner, this audio is recommended.AJoanna Burkhardt, Coll. of Continuing Education Lib., Univ. of Rhode Island, Providence Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review, Joe Queenan
As with Hiaasen's previous novels, Sick Puppy begins with an absurd premise and then gets nuttier.


From AudioFile
Skink, a former Florida governor now waging war on developers, moves into the spotlight and takes on a protégé in Carl Hiaasen's latest comic thriller. This abridgment captures the bizarre flavor of Hiaasen's writing, preserving its eccentricities of plot and humor. Reader Ed Asner emphasizes Hiaasen's sardonic touches. Oddly, his range of voices seems better developed for minor characters, such as the operators of an illegal wildlife hunt. The three main characters-Skink; Twilly Spree, the protégé; and Palmer Stoat, the lobbyist caught in the eco-terrorists' cross hairs-are given almost the same voice. Despite this limitation, Hiaasen's fans will undoubtedly enjoy this reading of his latest volume. J.A.S. © AudioFile 2000, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine


From Booklist
"Round up the usual suspects," is hardly a phrase one could ever imagine using in a review of a Carl Hiaasen novel. After all, Hiaasen's brand of apocalyptic surrealism is nothing if not distinctive. And yet, in his eighth novel, the author's idiosyncratic blending of slapstick nightmare, and moral outrage has begun to sound like shtick. And his loony good guys and bumblingly lethal bad guys have become almost interchangeable. The plot this time follows the same basic pattern as Stormy Weather (1995): a crazed protector of Florida's diminishing natural resources extracts bizarre retribution from those set on despoiling the land. Clinton "Skink" Tyree, the ex-governor turned hermit and avenging angel, led the charge in Stormy Weather and returns here in a supporting role. Taking the point is Twilly Spree, a 26-year-old millionaire who starts the surrealistic ball rolling by dumping a load of garbage in the open BMW convertible of one Palmer Stoat, political fixer and world-class litterbug. Soon, after joining forces with Skink and Stoat's disaffected wife (and rambunctious black lab), Twilly sets out to undermine Stoat's latest project: turning a pristine island into a luxury condo community. Oh, but there is so much more: a rampaging rhino, a psycho killer who plays pirated 911 tapes on his car stereo, a developer with a Barbie-doll fetish--you know, the usual suspects. The sameness of all this takes the trailblazing edge off the novel, but the black humor is still there; Hiaasen may be repeating himself, but he keeps coming up with outrageously bizarre bits (like the vain hit man who wears a padded corset of cured rattlesnake skins to hide his bulging belly). There is plenty to enjoy here, but Hiaasen clearly faces a decision: keep going down the same path, and risk becoming the Rodney Dangerfield of ecoterrorist crime fiction, or use his remarkable inventiveness to strike out in some new direction. Bill Ott


From Kirkus Reviews
Will another unspoiled Florida island be turned into a paradise for golfers and crooked developers and politicians? Hiassen tells all in this hilariously barbed but rambling expos. The richness of the satire is indicated by the fetishes given nearly every participant to the controversy over Shearwater (n Toad) Island. Lobbyist Palmer Stoat lives to make deals, smoke cigars, and hunt the senile denizens of the local Wilderness Veldt Plantation. The pliant target of his latest campaign, Gov. Dick Artemus, still approaches every human relationship as another exercise in selling Toyotas. Hopeful Shearwater developer Robert Clapley, who never got over his adolescent attachment to Barbie dolls, is surgically enhancing a pair of willing young women to resemble twin Barbies. Clapleys soft-spoken enforcer, Mr. Gash, collects recordings of 911 emergency calls. Twilly Spree, the angry young man who gives the novel its title, is a self-appointed nemesis to litterbugs like Palmer Stoat. Its only Palmers long-suffering wife Desirata who escapes getting labeled by her hangup, and thats because, like Palmers black Lab Boodle, whom Twilly kidnaps and renames McGuinn, she functions as a hangup herself for so many others. But though the inventive connections between fetishism and capitalism, lobbying and extortion, anger management and tyranny show Hiaasen the satiristlast glimpsed in the columns collected in Kick Ass (p. 1546)at the top of his game, Hiaasen the novelist relies on too many coincidences, too shaggy a plot, and too many curtain calls for crazy sage Clinton Tyree (Stormy Weather, 1995, etc.), the one-eyed ex-governor/wild man who personifies everything the author only wishes were true of Florida politics. Not top-drawer Hiaasen, then, but its selling points do include much sex, none of it in the missionary position, and a detailed concluding account of the characters later lives, in the manner of Dickens on 'ludes. (First printing of 200,000; Literary Guild alternate selection) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Review
"Carl Hiaasen once again produces a devilishly funny caper. In Sick Puppy, he shows himself to be a comic writer at the peak of his powers."
-- Publisher's Weekly

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Barnes & Noble Review
Carl Hiaasen is the reigning master of what Dave Barry recently dubbed "the Bunch of South Florida Wackos" school of crime fiction. His eight novels ￯﾿ﾽ of which Sick Puppy is the most outrageous ￯﾿ﾽ are grotesque, relentlessly funny accounts of greed and corruption that circle repeatedly around a common theme: the systematic despoliation of modern Florida.

Sick Puppy's convoluted plot springs from a single archetypal phenomenon: the multimillion-dollar real estate deal. This particular deal concerns ex-drug smuggler Robert Clapley and his ongoing attempts to "develop" yet another untouched Gulf Coast island, riding roughshod over its complex ecology and replacing its natural beauties with a full complement of yacht clubs, golf courses, and high-rise condominiums. Clapley's scheme is entirely dependent on the government's willingness to build a million bridge between the island and the Florida mainland. To facilitate the necessary legislation, Clapley secures the services of lobbyist and political fixer Palmer Stoat, inadvertently setting in motion an escalating series of bizarre events.

Palmer Stoat is a man with connections, a man who gets things done. In addition, he is a liar, a philanderer, and a phallocentric egotist with a weakness for imported cigars and "canned" big-game hunts. He is also, unfortunately for him, a litterbug. In the latter capacity, he attracts the attention of a good-hearted, slightly demented ecoterrorist named Twilly Spree. Twilly begins to stalk Palmer, punishing himinspectacular fashion for such petty infractions as tossing hamburgerwrappers out of his car window. Inevitably, Twilly learns that Palmer is a party to a much grander ecological crime: Robert Clapley's impending development of Shearwater Island. At that point, Twilly, who has always had a problem with "anger management," declares unconditional war against Palmer, his partners, and their shortsighted, self-serving schemes.

Twilly's war, which begins with the kidnapping of Palmer's black Labrador (the sick puppy of the title) and ends in the aftermath of a violent encounter with an ancient black rhinoceros named El Jefe, forms the substance of this extravagant entertainment, which is as notable for the vigor and variousness of its characters as it is for the twists and turns of its demented plot. And though Sick Puppy does contain its fair share of sympathetic characters ￯﾿ﾽ the perpetually angry Twilly Spree; Desirada "Desie" Stoat, Palmer's attractive, deeply disaffected wife; and a wonderfully characterized wild man (a recurring character in Hiaasen novels) named Skink, a former governor who has seceded from civilized society and declared his own private war against the despoilers of Florida ￯﾿ﾽ the novel is ultimately most notable for its richly imagined assortment of patented Hiaasen grotesques.

Foremost among these are Palmer Stoat, who believes, with some justification, that the world and its contents are for sale, and real estate developer Robert Clapley, whose sexuality is rooted in a fetishistic fascination with Barbie dolls. The supporting cast, which is equally off-the-wall, includes Dick Artemis, whose successful career as a Toyota salesman left him perfectly positioned for a second career as governor of Florida; Estella Hyde, a prostitute who will only have sex with registered Republicans; and Karl Krimmler, a rabid opponent of all things natural, a man whose personality was irrevocably warped by a childhood encounter with a hostile chipmunk. Finally, and most memorably, there is Mr. Gash, a professional hit man whose hobbies include sexual acts involving multiple partners and a custom-built trapeze, and who is an avid collector of uncensored recordings of 911 emergency calls.

Sick Puppy is Carl Hiaasen at his most flamboyant and unrestrained. In typical Hiaasen fashion, it is many things at once: thriller, comedy, diatribe, and satirical meditation on the endless varieties of human venality. Its very considerable humor is fueled, at all times, by anger and by an awareness of the simultaneous beauty and fragility of a natural world that is shrinking every day, eroded by the endless desire for power and profit, for "more, more, more, more." Like the best of Hiaasen's earlier work, Sick Puppy is a comedy with brains, heart, and teeth. It is a provocative, immensely entertaining novel, and it deserves the popularity it is doubtless about to achieve.

￯﾿ﾽBill Sheehan

Bill Sheehan reviews horror, suspense, and science fiction for Cemetery Dance, The New York Review of Science Fiction, and other publications. His book-length critical study of the fiction of Peter Straub, At the Foot of the Story Tree, will be published by Subterranean Press (www.subterraneanpress.com) in the spring of 2000.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

When Palmer Stoat notices the black pickup truck following him on the highway, he fears his precious Range Rover is about to be carjacked. But Twilly Spree, the man tailing Stoat, has vengeance, not sport-utility vehicles, on his mind. Idealistic, independently wealthy and pathologically short-tempered, Twilly has dedicated himself to saving Florida's wilderness from runaway destruction. He favors unambiguous political statements -- such as torching Jet-Skis or blowing up banks -- that leave his human targets shaken but re-educated.

After watching Stoat blithely dump a trail of fast-food litter out the window, Twilly decides to teach him a lesson. Thus, Stoat's prized Range Rover becomes home to a horde of hungry dung beetles. Which could have been the end to it had Twilly not discovered that Stoat is one of Florida's cockiest and most powerful political fixers, whose latest project is the "malling" of a pristine Gulf Coast island. Now the real Hiaasen-variety fun begins ...

Dognapping eco-terrorists, bogus big-time hunters, a Republicans-only hooker, an infamous ex-governor who's gone back to nature, thousands of singing toads and a Labrador retriever greater than the sum of his Labrador parts -- these are only some of the denizens of Carl Hiaasen's outrageously funny new novel.

Brilliantly twisted entertainment wrapped around a powerful ecological plea, Sick Puppy gleefully lives up to its title and gives us Hiaasen at his riotous and muckraking best.

SYNOPSIS

When Palmer Stoat notices the black pickup truck following him on the highway, he fears his precious Range Rover is about to be carjacked. But Twilly Spree, the man tailing Stoat, has vengeance, not sport-utility vehicles, on his mind.

FROM THE CRITICS

Tom Nolan - Wall Street Journal

Less romantic and more eccentric is Carl Hiassen's grotesquely amusing Sick Puppy Fans will not be disappointed.

Boston Globe

Sick Puppy' follows the contradictory maxims that have become mainstays in Hiaasen's novels. Eccentric characters possess a veneer of realism. Each absurdity is so painfully close to reality it sometimes feels that Hiaasen, who is a Miami Herald columnist, is writing a news story instead of fiction.

Publishers Weekly

Florida muckraker Hiaasen once again produces a devilishly funny caper revolving around the environmental exploitation of his home state by greedy developers. When budding young ecoterrorist Twilly Spree begins a campaign of sabotage against a grotesque litterbug named Palmer Stoat, he gets much more than he bargained for. Stoat is a political fixer, involved with a bevy of shady types: Dick Artemus, ex-car salesman, now governor; Robert Clapley, a crooked land developer with an unhealthy interest in Barbie dolls; and his business expediter, Mr. Gash, a permed reptilian thug with ghastly musical tastes: "All morning he drove back and forth across the old bridge, with his favorite 911 compilation in the tape deck: Snipers in the Workplace, accompanied by an overdub of Tchaikowsky's Symphony No. 3 in D Major." After a wave of preemptive strikes centered on a garbage truck and a swarm of dung beetles, Twilly ups the ante and kidnaps both Palmer's dog and his wife, Desie, who finds Twilly a great deal more interesting than her slob of a husband. In doing so Twilly uncovers a conspiracy (well, more like business as usual) to jam a bill through the Florida legislature to develop Toad Island, a wildlife sanctuary, in a deal that will make a mint for all the politicos concerned. Chapley wants Twilly silenced and dispatches Mr. Gash. Palmer wants his wife and dog back and asks Dick Artemus to help in the rescue without derailing the bill. Who should be called upon but the good cop/bad psycho duo of Trooper Jim Tile and ex-Governor Clinton Tyree, aka Skink or the Captain, whose recurring appearances throughout Hiaasen's novels have made for hysterical farce. While there may be nothing laughable about unchecked environmental exploitation, Hiaasen has refined his knack for using this gloomy but persistent state of affairs as a prime mover for scams of all sorts. In Sick Puppy, he shows himself to be a comic writer at the peak of his powers. Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

In typical Hiaasen fashion, this story involves corrupt, crazed, and powe-hungry Florida politicians accidentally pitted against quirky but innocent individuals. Twilly Spree is trying to save Florida from litterers, so when state lobbyist Palmer Stoat starts throwing trash from his Range Rover, he is incensed. The next time Stoat and his wife go out to dinner, Spree buries their BMW convertible in trash, but this fails to reform him. In continuing to pursue Stoat, Spree uncovers a pork barrel deal that will transform wild Toad Island into Sheerwater Resort. To stop the project Spree kidnaps the Stoats' family dog. The mayhem that follows includes kinky sex, bulldozers, hit men, a big game hunt, and an ex-governor turned ecoterrorist. In the end, good triumphs over evil. Hiaasen's hijinks are outrageous, unbelievable, and thought-provoking. The worrysome grains of truth and reality in the story give pause. Masterfully read by Edward Asner, this audio is recommended.--Joanna Burkhardt, Coll. of Continuing Education Lib., Univ. of Rhode Island, Providence Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\

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