 First edition | |
| Author | Carl Hiaasen |
|---|---|
| Cover artist | George Corsillo |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Crime novel |
| Publisher | G. P. Putnam's Sons |
Publication date | 1986 |
| Publication place | United States |
| Media type | Print (hardback and paperback) |
| Pages | 272 |
| ISBN | 0-399-13145-0 |
| OCLC | 12663997 |
| 813/.54 19 | |
| LC Class | PS3558.I217 T68 1986 |
| Followed by | Double Whammy |
Tourist Season is a 1986 novel by Carl Hiaasen. It was his first solo novel, after co-writing several mystery/thriller novels with William Montalbano.
Las Noches de Diciembre (Spanish, "The Nights of December") is a small terrorist cell led by rogue newspaper columnist Skip Wiley, calling himself El Fuego. Skip believes that the only way to save Florida's natural beauty from destruction is to violently dissuade tourists from visiting and/or settling in the state. Recruiting three comrades with similar vendettas against the Florida establishment, they begin a spree of flashy kidnappings, murders and bombings to frighten off new arrivals. Their first victim is B.D. "Sparky" Harper, the head of Miami's Chamber of Commerce. Sparky's body is found stuffed into an oversized suitcase, dressed in a garish tourist outfit, smeared with sunscreen and with his legs amputated. Next, the group starts kidnapping and killing random tourists and Florida residents, many of whom are fed to a giant crocodile nicknamed "Pavlov".
Brian Keyes, a private investigator and former reporter for the Miami Sun, is hired to help defend petty burglar Ernesto Cabal, who was caught driving Sparky's stolen car. Brian does not believe that Ernesto killed Sparky, but Miami police dismiss him. Ernesto commits suicide when told by his own lawyer that the case is a lost cause. Brian is then hired by Nell Bellamy to find her missing husband (the first tourist victim) and by Sun editor Cab Mulcahy to locate the missing Skip. After an encounter with his ex-girlfriend Jenna (who is now dating Skip), Brian tracks Skip to the Everglades and is captured by Las Noches. Revealing himself, Skip tells Brian to return to Miami and spread the word of the group's demands. He then has Brian watch as their latest victim is fed to Pavlov. Brian tries to stop the murder and is stabbed in the back by one of Skip's followers, a Cuban named Jesús Bernal. He is returned to Miami and treated in the hospital.
Since it is the start of tourist season, the police's initial reaction to Brian's warnings is to engage in a cover-up, dismissing the Las Noches communiques as a hoax. Sun reporter Ricky Bloodworth uncovers the letters and writes an article but misspells the name of the group as "Las Nachos". The terrorists retaliate with several bombings, forcing the authorities to take them seriously. Brian's old friend, Detective Al Garcia, is appointed head of a task force to catch the terrorists. Based on Skip's hints, Brian, Cab and Al deduce that the terrorists plan to kidnap Miami's much-touted Orange Bowl Queen. Since civic leaders refuse to cancel the Orange Bowl Parade or to provide the beauty queen with visible police protection, Al suggests hiring Brian as her undercover bodyguard. Brian finds the beauty queen, Kara Lynn Shivers, to be an intelligent and sensible girl who is only in the beauty queen "racket" to indulge her father. Brian and Kara Lynn grow closer, eventually developing a relationship.
While escorting Kara Lynn home from a tennis game, Brian catches Jesús loitering in the parking lot and beats him into submission with a racket. Furious that Jesús has foiled the group's element of surprise, Skip devises a new plan. Jesús, aching for reinstatement with the anti-Castro terrorist group he was expelled from, abandons Las Noches and sends a mail bomb to Al. Farcically, the bomb is instead opened by an over-eager Ricky, illegally sifting Garcia's mail for clues about the terrorists. Because of Jesús' poor construction, the bomb only injures Ricky. Al never learns that the bomb was addressed to him, and the bombing is attributed to Las Noches. The next evening, Skip uses a helicopter to bombard the deck of a cruise ship with shopping bags containing live snakes. As the panicked passengers dive off the ship and the Coast Guard is summoned, the helicopter unexpectedly crashes at sea before it reaches land. No bodies are recovered. Miami's civic leaders assume the terrorists are dead, but Brian and Al insist that their security precautions remain in place until after the parade.
In a last-ditch effort, Jesús kidnaps Al at gunpoint and drives him to Key Largo to be executed. Al is wounded in the shoulder by Jesús' shotgun, but Brian manages to track them down and kills Jesús. To Brian's surprise, the parade proceeds without any sign of Las Noches. The following evening, during the Orange Bowl, he belatedly realizes that Kara Lynn is supposed to make a brief appearance during the game's halftime show and figures out that Las Noches has chosen that moment to strike. Kara Lynn is kidnapped and carried out of the stadium on an airboat, though one of the terrorists, ex-football player "Viceroy" Wilson, is shot to death by her unofficial escort. Brian deduces from Skip's old press clippings that he has taken Kara Lynn to Osprey Island, a small nature preserve in the middle of Biscayne Bay. There, Skip reveals to Kara Lynn that the island has been mined with dynamite, to be exploded at dawn, to allow for the construction of a new condominium. He plans to leave her there, with the island's other remaining wildlife, so that her death will send a message to Florida's greedy developers.
Before Skip can depart, Brian arrives and disables him with a bullet to the leg. Skip initially refuses to tell Brian where he has anchored his boat, prepared to let the dynamite claim the three of them all at once. However, upon realizing that Brian has brought Jenna along, he surrenders the boat's location. To Brian's surprise, he refuses to go along with them. As they speed away from the island, Keyes, Kara Lynn and Jenna look back and see Skip is climbing a tree, trying to scare a bald eagle nesting there into taking flight before the dynamite explodes. The novel ends just as the "all clear" signal for the detonation is sounded, with the three of them whispering the same prayer: "Please fly away."
The book is not only an example of the crime fiction genre, but a satire as well, of many subjects from tourism to sports to race relations to the newsroom. It also contains examples of the literary device of the red herring; for example, deep background is given to characters who appear briefly only to die off, which keeps the reader guessing as to who will make it to the end of the book.
Hiaasen is a newspaper columnist from the Miami Herald . In an interview, he said that he took much of his inspiration from his work on the Herald. [1] Readers may believe that Skip Wiley is a slightly more crazed version of the author; both are newspaper columnists, and both are very passionate and entertaining writers. One theme that persists in the book is moral ambiguity; while Brian Keyes understands the value of Skip Wiley's ends, Keyes would have preferred a less violent means. Their conflict arises as a matter of where they place their allegiance: Brian Keyes to humankind, and Skip Wiley to the wild.
Hiaasen's novels typically deal with distinctly Floridian themes such as environmental destruction of unique ecosystems, the inability to sustain rapid growth, and crooked politicians, among others.
An audiobook version of Tourist Season was released in 1998 by Recorded Books. The audiobook, read by George Wilson, is unabridged and runs 13 hours 48 minutes over 12 CDs. [2]
Carl Hiaasen is an American journalist and novelist. He began his career as a newspaper reporter and by the late 1970s had begun writing novels in his spare time, both for adults and for middle grade readers. Two of his novels have been made into feature films.
Sick Puppy is a 2000 novel by Carl Hiaasen.
Osceola, named Billy Powell at birth in Alabama, became an influential leader of the Seminole people in Florida. His mother was Muscogee, and his great-grandfather was a Scotsman, James McQueen. He was reared by his mother in the Creek (Muscogee) tradition. When he was a child, they migrated to Florida with other Red Stick refugees, led by a relative, Peter McQueen, after their group's defeat in 1814 in the Creek Wars. There they became part of what was known as the Seminole people.
Orlando Bosch Ávila was a Cuban exile militant, who headed the Coordination of United Revolutionary Organizations (CORU), described by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation as a terrorist organization. Born in Cuba, Bosch attended medical school at the University of Havana, where he befriended Fidel Castro. He worked as a doctor in Santa Clara Province in the 1950s, but moved to Miami in 1960 after he stopped supporting the Cuban Revolution.
Lucky You is a 1997 novel by Carl Hiaasen. It is set in Florida, and recounts the story of JoLayne Lucks, a black woman who is one of two winners of a lottery.
Strip Tease is a 1993 novel by Carl Hiaasen. Like most of his other novels, it is a crime novel set in Florida and features Hiaasen's characteristic black humor. The novel focuses on a single mother who has turned to exotic dancing to earn enough money to gain legal custody of her young daughter, and ends up matching wits with a lecherous United States Congressman and his powerful corporate backers.
Stormy Weather is a 1995 novel by Carl Hiaasen. It takes place in the chaotic aftermath of Hurricane Andrew in South Florida and concerns the tragic effects of the disaster, including insurance scams, street fights, hunting for food and shelter, corrupt bureaucracy, a ravaged environment and disaster tourists.
Clinton Tyree, a.k.a. Skink, is a fictional character who has appeared in several novels by Carl Hiaasen, beginning with Double Whammy in 1987. He is a former governor of Florida who suddenly abandoned his office to live in the wilderness, most often the Everglades and, later, the Florida Keys. Tyree is depicted as a skilled outdoorsman, a partaker of roadkill cuisine, and a fierce and slightly unhinged opponent of sprawl and overdevelopment in the state.
Big Trouble is Dave Barry's first novel. Barry, a longtime columnist for The Miami Herald, set the novel's events in and around Miami, Florida.
Double Whammy is a 1987 novel by Carl Hiaasen. The protagonist, a private investigator, is hired to expose a celebrity bass fisherman as a cheat and is drawn into a frame-up for murder. The book introduced the character of "Skink", who becomes a recurring character in Hiaasen's subsequent novels.
Nature Girl is a novel by Carl Hiaasen, published in 2006.
Naked Came the Manatee (ISBN 978-0399141928) is a mystery thriller parody novel published in 1996. It is composed of thirteen chapters, each written by a different Miami-area writer. It was originally published as a serial in the Miami Herald'sTropic magazine, one chapter per issue, and later published as a single novel. Its title is a reference to the literary hoax Naked Came the Stranger. The book was conceived of and edited by Tom Shroder, then editor of Tropic. Dave Barry came up with the first chapter, which was then handed to the next writer, and so on until Carl Hiaasen had to tie all the loose threads together in the final chapter. Each chapter was written on deadline for publication in the magazine.
Native Tongue is a novel by Carl Hiaasen, published in 1991. Like all his novels, it is set in Florida. The themes of the novel include corruption, environmentalism, exploitation of endangered species, and animal rights.
Barometer Soup is the nineteenth studio album by American popular music singer-songwriter Jimmy Buffett. The album was released on MCA and Margaritaville Records on August 1, 1995.
Skin Tight is a novel by Carl Hiaasen. It focuses on a former detective for the Florida State Attorney's office, who becomes the target of a murder plot by a corrupt plastic surgeon.
Star Island is a 2010 novel by Carl Hiaasen, released on Tuesday, July 27, 2010.
Bad Monkey is a 2013 novel by Carl Hiaasen.
Razor Girl is a 2016 novel by Carl Hiaasen.
Robert Keith Hiaasen was an American journalist and assistant editor at The Capital, a newspaper published in Annapolis, Maryland. He also taught at the University of Maryland's Philip Merrill College of Journalism. A native of Plantation, then a rural suburb of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, Hiaasen began his career at The Palm Beach Post before joining The Baltimore Sun as a feature writer and where he later wrote a regular column. He was shot and killed at work at The Capital during the Capital Gazette shooting.
Emilio Milián was a Cuban-American radio commentator and newscaster. Known for his criticism both of communism and of terrorist activity among the Cuban exiles in Florida, he was the victim of a car-bombing attack in 1976 which left him disabled.