“A carrot cake is neighborly,” Burton said. “A blowjob is a plan.” [p. 76]
Florida health inspector (formerly police officer) Andrew Yancy is still visiting local restaurants ('more like a petri dish with menus') to investigate hygiene failures, such as giant Gambian pouched rats, something wriggling in the hummus, and hair clippings in the quinoa. The hair clippings come from Buck, a reality TV star who's fled a bar after his racist and homophobic jokes were poorly received. Normally his manager / agent, Lane, would have been a mitigating influence, but he's been kidnapped with the aid of the eponymous Razor Girl, an insurance fraudster who goes by the name of Merry Mansfield and whose speciality is faking traffic collisions whilst pretending to shave her bikini area. The guy Merry was supposed to, literally, bump into is Martin, the owner of a company called Sedimental Journeys, which provides high-quality sand ('like cocaine for your toes!') to replenish eroded beaches on the Eastern Seaboard. Martin falls foul of a New York mobster, who owes Andrew Yancy a canine-related favour, or possibly a diamond ring... Confused? You will be: but you'll enjoy it.
There are some serious elements to this headlong farce. Yancy's girlfriend Rosa, a coroner, heads off to Oslo, 'where children never, ever die from gunfire', and seems unlikely to return. Buck, the reality TV star, realises that he's inspired some batshit white supremacists. Yancy is keen to discourage the latest potential buyers of the empty lot next to his own: he suspects them (rightly) of wanting to build a McMansion and obscure his view of the sunset, not to mention the environmental impact. And Merry is an all-American con artist, let down by the system, independent and self-made, exploiting anyone who's sucker enough to believe her, but doing so without malice.
I think of Hiaasen's novels as beach reads (which is not a quality assessment, more an ambience thing) and purchased Razor Girl (a loose sequel to Bad Monkey) for a recent beach trip. It was a good choice. The tangle of connections resolves nicely, the characters are sufficiently well-written to engage, and Hiaasen's humour, while perhaps not as dark as in some of his earlier novels, still hits the spot.
Fulfils the 'household object on the cover' rubric of the 52 books in 2022 challenge. (There's a razor on the cover of my edition.)
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