||| by Jens Kruse |||
Carl Hiaasen is the author of 14 previous novels and until now I had not read any of them. That turned out to be a mistake, because, if this one is a good indication, I would have had a lot more laughter in my life. Hiaasen, who was born and raised in Florida and, at age 23, joined the staff of the Miami Herald as a general assignment reporter, and has continued to work there, currently as a columnist, until now, has a keen eye for the weirdness and absurdities of that state.
And if you think that that previous sentence slithered and coiled on for too long, you are right, but there is a reason for that. For, after all, the opening mystery of this novel is the disappearance of Kiki Pew Fitzsimmons, a wealthy socialite, during a charity gala in the exclusive island town of Palm Beach. As it turns out, after considerable investigative effort, Kiki – who belongs to a group of wealthy women who adore the current president and call themselves the POTUS pussies, or Potussies – has disappeared into the stomach of a nearly 20 foot long Burmese python.
Yes, this satirical mystery is set in the current time, the time of Trump and Covid. Much of it takes place in and around the Winter White House, Casa Bellicosa, where POTUS, whose Secret Service call name is MASTODON, and FLOTUS (MOCKINGBIRD) are in residence for most of the action. The first lady is having a torrid affair with one of the agents on her Secret Service detail while the president does the same with a pole dancer whom he calls his nutritionist. He also uses the disappearance of Kiki Fitzsimmons to accuse, without evidence, an illegal immigrant named Diego Beltran to be the vicious murderer of Ms. Fitzsimmons. In due course a NO MORE DIEGOS movement springs up and a lynch mob gathers around the county jail where Diego is being held.
The novel teems with interesting characters, but the most interesting one is the protagonist Angie Armstrong, who runs a critter removal business called Discreet Captures. When she is not snaring home-invading raccoons she decapitates Burmese pythons with her machete. She is the one who encounters the 20-foot python with the large bump in its middle and is the first to suspect that the vanished Kiki might be the reason for that bump.
Shortly after we meet her, the narrator makes us privy to one of Angie’s dreams:
She fell asleep anticipating another enigmatic dream. Tonight’s feature starred the commander-in-chief himself. Angie had been summoned to Casa Bellicosa to unfasten a screech owl from the presidential pompadour, which the low-swooping raptor had mistaken for a road-kill fox. When Angie arrived, the commander-in-chief was lurching madly around the helipad, bellowing and clawing at the Velcro skull patch into which the confused bird had embedded its talons. The owl was still clutching a plug of melon-colored fibers when Angie freed it. Swiftly she was led to a windowless room and made to sign a document that she’d never set foot on the property, or glimpsed the President without his hair. A man wearing a Confederate colonel’s uniform and a red baseball cap stepped forward and hung a milk-chocolate medal around Angie’s neck, after which she was escorted at sword-point out of the gates. (35)
In real life, of course, the president has no such mishaps (except one involving his tanning bed) and is adored by the Potussies:
They wintered in Palm Beach, mainly for the sunshine, gilded charity circuit and cosmetic surgery advances, but what bonded them as a unit was their unshakable devotion to the perpetually besieged President. Throughout the long deep-state witch hunt – the doctored Minsk defecation video, the phony tax-evasion probe, the counterfeit porn-star diaries, the bogus Moscow skyscraper investigation, the hoax penile-enhancement scandal, the fake witness- tampering charges, and both fraudulent impeachment trials – the Potussies had remained steadfast, vociferous, adoring defenders. (102-103)
I will not deprive you of the pleasure of hurtling along all the plots and sub-plots of Hiaasen’s rollicking, roiling story. But suffice it to say that we meet shady characters and petty criminals, that we make the acquaintance of a former Florida governor who now lives in a rustic camp in the Everglades, that Palm Beach is overrun by very large pythons, that, with the help of Angie, Diego is eventually exonerated and freed, causing MASTODON to invent a new villain “that he referred to, variously, as Bang Lo Sinh, Li Sonh Bang, or Lee Roy Bangston – a ‘diabolical Chinese espionage agent and self-infected virus carrier’ (328).”
Carl Hiaasen’s Squeeze Me (New York: Knopf, 2020) can be checked out, by way of curbside pickup, from the Orcas Library or obtained through Darvill’s Bookstore.
