About This Book
Florida has always been fertile ground for chaos, and Carl Hiaasen mines it mercilessly in Razor Girl, a crime novel where a staged fender-bender on the way to the Keys kicks off a cascade of spectacularly bad decisions involving a fake reality TV duck-caller, a sand-theft operation, a New York mob boss with a weakness for Hawaiian shirts, and a woman named Merry Mansfield whose fender-bender scam has a way of going sideways. Detective Andrew Yancy is tangled up in all of it, trying to claw his way back onto the force while the absurdity mounts around him. The stakes are real — people are missing, others are dead — but the genius of Hiaasen is that none of it ever feels grim.
What makes Razor Girl such a pleasure to read is the precision of Hiaasen's comic timing. His sentences do exactly as much work as needed and no more, and his eye for the particular wrongness of Florida — the grift, the greed, the strip-mall surrealism — is sharp as ever. The plotting feels loose but isn't; every ridiculous thread eventually pulls taut. Readers who like their crime fiction with a high absurdity ceiling and genuine wit will find this deeply satisfying.