In most of the previous novels there’s been not only a central theme but a central crime or scam, which then spawns further crimes in a bid to cover it up (I’m thinking in particular of Skin Tight though the same structure informs his most recent book, Squeeze Me) and these subsidiary crimes ramify out into a luxurious growth of garish characters and grotesque incidents. In the darkness, she couldn’t see Augustine’s expression. What the text consists of is the adventures of a larger-than-usual cast of miscellaneous characters, often lowlife, often criminal, across the comprehensively devastated and trashed South Florida landscape after the hurricane has hit. The hurricane happens off-stage, as it were, and has been and gone by page 30. Just like its predecessors, Stormy Weather rotates around a central theme, in this case the impact of a big hurricane on South Florida (the setting for all Carl Hiaasen’s novels), from which all kinds of other topics and issues spin in gleeful riot.Īctually, I was hoping for some grand set-piece description of a hurricane but the storm itself is strangely absent. Boy, is it full of scumbags and sleazeballs! It is longer than usual, at 472 pages, and it feels decisively more nihilistic and misanthropic than its predecessors. Stormy Weather is Carl Hiaasen’s sixth novel. Everyone was on edge evil, violence and paranoia ripened in the shadows.

Nothing in her modest criminal part had prepared her for the hazy and menacing vibe of the hurricane zone.

Stormy Weather by Carl Hiaasen