NATIVE TONGUE, by Carl Hiaasen

Native Tongue is a comic (more like wacky) story of environmental civil disobedience in south Florida. The protagonist, Joe Winder, works as a PR copy writer at "The Amazing Kingdom of Thrills", a kind of wannabe Disney clone theme park set up and headed by an ex-gangster turned informant who is on the Witness Protection Program. He's a greedy, low class and absurd villian who's easy to hate and laugh at. The plot has a number of convoluted twists, but is cleverly written, with lots of cutting satire and silly plot devices. Characters are mostly over-the-top stereotpes, like the pistol-packing little old lady environmentalist, steroid addicted/crazed head of security, yuppie/preppie PR head, etc. But there are also some more interesting figures, such as Winder himself, his love interest, and the mysterious activist/domestic environmental terrorist "Skink." Hiaasen sometimes goes back to the same characters to tell other stories, as he did in Stormy Weather, set in the post-hurricane Andrew chaos of south Florida. In that book, the mysterious "skink" is fleshed out more. All-in-all, Native Tongue a fun book that held my interest and had a number of laugh-out-loud moments.

Click here for a review of the book from Pele Publications: http://www.pelepubs.com/bookreview.shtml?id=46