When Abbott, pathologically driven to cash in on celebrity “money shots,’’ kidnaps Ann instead of Cherry, the plot kicks into gear. It’s a wild one featuring symbiotic heroines (Ann fits the tag far more than Cherry), a former hit man turned bodyguard named Chemo, that familiar deranged Hiaasen character Skink, and brilliantly named minor players such as Cherry’s sometime fling Tanner Dane Keefe, the rapacious and fraudulent developer Jackie Sebago, and Methane Drudge, drummer for the Poon Pilots. The aura over all and likely the novel’s inspiration is reminiscent of Michael Jackson, whose death prompted the sale of CDs in a volume the Gloved One hadn’t seen since the early part of his career.
Cherry appears to be a conflation of Britney Spears, Amy Winehouse, and Lindsay Lohan. Lykes seems modeled on Lou Pearlman, the former manager of ’N Sync and Backstreet Boys now doing time on a Ponzi scheme conviction. Skink, who also figured in such Hiaasen novels as “Skinny Dip’’ and “Native Tongue,’’ is the nickname of fictional former Florida governor Clinton Tyree, who abruptly quit the job to become an environmental guerrilla warrior. These characters are so rich that it’s easy to overlook the details that make this book especially juicy.
Take Abbott, who nabbed a Pulitzer Prize for spot news while working for the St. Petersburg Times. His winning image: a snap of a Canadian tourist attacked by a lemon shark. Trouble is, the photo was “doctored’’ by Abbott, who wasn’t smart enough to cover his tracks. Other characters are similarly shady, like the developer Sebago, who suffers a creative and grievous injury to his private parts, and Fremont Spores, a seedy police scanner addict who tips Abbott to the whereabouts of compromised celebrities.
