It's been a very long time since I first read Tourist Season, but Hiaasen's viciousness towards the venal and corrupt stupid infesting his beloved Florida has not abated one bit. Now his ire is focused on wild celebrities and the people who prey on them. No, it's not really Hiaasen at his best, but it's a polished, scabrous romp through a particularly repulsive underbelly.

We have a corpulent, sweaty paparazzi; a spoiled, out-of-control, barely talented pop star; her put-upon stand-in whose existence she is blissfully unaware of; her mother, who thinks all her drug-overdoses are food-poisoning; her skeevy manager; her plastic PR people and her ex-con, facially disfigured, cattle-prod wielding bodyguard. When the paparazzo accidentally kidnaps the stand-in, she has to be gotten back without alerting the police or the pop-star.

And so a weird, dysfunctional farce begins, wherein the disfigured sociopath with the weed-strimmer for a hand is one of the more sympathetic characters. It's funny, well-written, on-target, and if it's not quite as wild and weird as you might want it to be, well it's still a lot of fun.