Lucky You

Carl Hiaasen was a guest at Bouchercon 1998. I wasn't really familiar with him back then, but a few months later I read the copy of Lucky You that had been in the goody bag and may have been given a slightly wider berth on SEPTA that week. I then handed it to my parents who were packing for a cruise, and both separately learned that they couldn't read it in public areas because of the looks they got.  Particularly my dad,who had a distinctive, obnoxious, and loud laugh. Did I enjoy it as much twenty years later?

JoLayne Lucks lives in a town full of questionable miracles and adjacent to a privately owned (but for sale) wilderness.  When she wins the Florida lottery (well, half of it) features writer Tom Krome reluctantly goes to interview her. He finds that she's been beaten by the two-man self-proclaimed militia who won the other half of the jackpot and that she wants the money to protect the baby turtles who live in the tentatively sold wetlands. I remember all that, plus the evolution of Turtle Boy, the militia's kidnapping of a Hooters waitress, and the fact that JoLayne reclaimed her ticket.  I did not remember Krome's soon-to-be-ex-wife (an actress who'd creatively avoided service of the divorce papers for two years), Krome's girlfriend and her husband (a murderous judge with a dim clerk), or the fact that a money-laundering mobster had put in a bid for JoLayne's wetlands. Hiaasen follows his typical formula - quotable and witty descriptions of bizarre, only-in-Florida crimes and characters - but he didn't tie the subplots together as tightly as he does now, either thematically or chronologically (the main plot ends with about 50 pages left in the novel). Anti-government militias, even incompetent two-man outfits, are a bit darker than they were in 1998, so I cringed a bit as I laughed -but I still laughed. Maybe not as loud and as obnoxiously as my dad did, but enough that I didn't pull the book out if the train was crowded.