“Razor Girl”

Carl Hiaasen is a very fun author.  A native Floridian, he sets his stories in a small community in the Florida Keys.  “Razor Girl” is his second novel featuring Andrew Yancy.  Yancy has been put on permanent leave from the local police force because of an incident involving his girl friend’s husband detailed in Hiaasen’s previous novel “Bad Monkey.”  Yancy has been demoted to the Health Department.  His main job is to investigate reports at local restaurants dealing with unsanitary food preparation and sightings of rats, bugs, etc. sighted in restaurant dining rooms.

Yancy continues to try to be reinstated to his old job.  He continually gets involved with investigating criminal activities.  “Razor Girl” features a disreputable, inane cast of characters.  Razor Girl is Merry, like Merry Christmas, Mansfield.  She is a scam artist who is contracted to ram into cars and cheat the gullible drivers.  How she is able to con these drivers is fully explained in the first few pages of the book.  Needless to say, it involves driving and shaving.

In addition, the other characters are a mob enforcer, Dominick “Big Noogie” Aeola, Buck Nance and his family, who are reality television stars, their agent Lane Coolman, and a product-liability lawyer, who is using the product involved in the class-action suit he is prosecuting with very bad results.  There are also several girl friends, wives,  and ex-wives of these characters.

  The plot involves the kidnapping of Buck Nance and Lane Coolman by an unhinged, street-smart criminal named Blister.  Eventually all of the characters get involved in the kidnapping and or trying to locate a diamond ring lost by one of the characters.  How this all unfolds makes for a hilarious read.

We hope that Hiaasen has more adventures awaiting Andrew Yancy, but it is inconceivable that they could be any more zany that what happens in “Razor Girl.”