‘Face it, we live in a stinking shitwash of cruelty and greed and rotten manners.’
(Honey Santana, the nature girl of the title, page 264)
Chapter one
Tommy Tigertail was the strong, silent Native American member of the four-strong eco-‘terrorist’ group led by renegade journalist Skip Wiley, who wreaked havoc in Hiaasen’s farcical first novel, Tourist Season. At the end of that novel, Tommy returned to south Florida’s reservation for Seminole Indians to help run their lucrative casinos.
Ten books and 20 years later, Hiaasen’s eleventh comedy crime thriller opens with Tommy’s young nephew, Sammy Tigertail, disposing of the body of a fat, drunk, middle-aged white tourist named Jeter Wilson. Tommy didn’t murder him. He was giving Wilson a tour of the Everglades when the airboat he was driving through some high grass accidentally threw a harmless, non-poisonous banded water snake up onto Wilson’s neck. Such was Wilson’s panic that he thrashed around screaming trying to get the snake off him till he dropped dead of a heart attack.
Knowing that if he contacted the racist authorities, he would immediately be blamed and arrested, Sammy weighted down Wilson’s body, dropped it in a deep point of a canal, drove to meet his half brother Lee, to collect his favourite belongings (including a spiffy Gibson electric guitar), then, rather than return to the reservation (where he might be tracked down by police and so cause trouble for his community) hitch-hikes off into the boondocks (definition: ‘rough or isolated country.’)
At the start of a completely different storyline, in a trailer in a park not far away, single mum Honey Santana, aged 39 (p.353) explains to her son, Fry, that she’s lost her latest job at the fish market because the boss, Mr Louis Piejack, crept up and grabbed her right breast, whereupon she turned round and hit him with a crab hammer in the nuts.
In mid-explanation she gets a call from a phone sales company, Relentless Inc, based in a disused B-52 hanger in Fort Worth, Texas; specifically from smooth-talking Boyd Shreave, who tries to sell her a property in some new housing development. When Honey Santana, a smart cookie, effortlessly dances round his call, taking the mickey out of him, Shreave forgets the golden rule of telesales (which is never lose your temper), loses his temper and calls Honey ‘a dried-up old skank’.
This shocks sales operatives sitting in the booth next to Boyd, Eugenie Fonda with whom he’s having an affair. Eugenie herself has a colourful backstory. In 1999 she began an affair with a tree trimmer named Van Bonneville, who claimed to have lost his wife in the recent hurricane – until, that is, police found her body, badly beaten around the head and strapped into the seat of their car which had been dumped in the St John’s River. Van Bonneville was convicted of murdering her and the story became notorious, dubbed the ‘Hurricane Homicide’ trial in the press.
Eugenie, at that point going by her real name of Jean Leigh Hill, was offered a publishing deal whereby a ghost writer came down from New York and helped her knock out her account of the story which, titled Storm Ghoul, became a bestseller and netted her half a million dollars. By this point Eugenie had hooked up with a stockbroker who persuaded her to invest it all in shares in a red hot company from Texas named Enron. Two years later went spectacularly bankrupt in one of America’s largest cases of corporate fraud and Eugenie lost everything.
Which is why she now finds herself sitting in a booth in a converted B-52 hanger in Texas, trying to sell people shares in a new property development and having a sexual fling with not particularly appealing Boyd Shreave, more out of boredom than anything else. After ending the call to Honey, Shreave takes a coffee break and wonders if his career has finally hit rock bottom. And indeed, the call had been recorded, his managers listen to it, and fire him.
Meanwhile Honey, fulled by rage against Mr Piejack, men in general and Boyd’s hideous insult in particular, decides she is going to phone back the company, insist on speaking to Shreave’s supervisor, and generally make his life a misery. She discovers the company has one of those number blockers, so she calls her brother, Richard Santana, a journalist in upstate New York, and he uses his databases to quickly ascertain the telecompany’s phone number and give it to Honey, who commences bombarding its switchboard with calls. Eventually she uses the ploy of pretending to be an insurance company which is trying to find a ‘Boyd’ employed by Relentless Inc in order to give him his payout on a crash. The guileless HR person gives Honey Boyd’s full name and address. Right.
As the story has developed we have learned that Honey Santana has mental health issues. To be precise, she has an obsessively vengeful personality, bordering on the bipolar, which is easily triggered, much to the exasperation of her long-suffering son, Fry. The boy’s father is Perry Skinner, a reformed dope smuggler, who Honey fell in love with, got pregnant by, but who was then busted and sent to gaol.
An example of Honey’s obsessiveness is that, while Skinner was in Elgin prison, she wrote him 147 letters, none of them forgiving him for getting busted for drug smuggling (p.230). She once sent the White House 97 emails to complain about the president’s support for a bill to allow oil drilling in an Alaska national park, bringing her to the attention of the Secret Service, who gave her a full assessment and concluded she didn’t pose a threat. They were wrong. Her doctor has prescribed medication, which she throws away. Her long-suffering son, Fry, tries to help and support her but he’s only 12.
Meanwhile, after the novel has described Boyd’s casual flirting with Eugenie it comes as a surprise to learn that he has a wife, Lily Shreave, though less of a surprise to learn that she has hired a private detective, Dealey, to tail him and take incriminating photos of Boyd and his mistress, Eugenie.
We get to know Dealey, hear his backstory, and to understand why he is particularly proud of a long-lens photo he took of Eugenie fellating Boyd in the car park of a takeaway delicatessen. It’s a career best for Dealey, which he sends off to a private investigator magazine who publish it (faces blurred out), much to the admiration of his fellow professionals (p.148). Amusing.
Pause for breath
All this information, the range of characters and their dense backstories, are conveyed in just the first 40 pages of this 400-page book. It’s a lot of information to process, isn’t it?. The bombardment of facts, people and descriptions suggests both Hiaasen’s characteristic strengths and weaknesses. The strengths are:
- lots of characters, with colourful and varied backgrounds
- their backstories described in great detail with journalistic concision and precision
- the certainty that these storylines are set to intersect and the pleasure of trying to figure out how and why
- extremely crisp and pithy dialogue, brilliantly capturing the characters’ modern, slangy, abbreviated speech rhythms
The main weakness being that all the characters have the shallowness of people mentioned in newspaper articles. You get name, age, weight, hair colour, a bit of backstory, then they’re thrown into the tumultuous pell-mell of farcical events. Close the book, as you would put down a newspaper, and half an hour later you’ve forgotten about them.
There’s precious little psychology. The characters are what they are and mostly stay the same throughout the narrative. The sense you get in each novel of a large cast of well-defined but somehow shallow characters reminds me a bit of the extravagantly large cast of characters in The Simpsons. And just as in The Simpsons, Hiaasen’s novels offer the amusement and comfort of recurring characters (the main ones being the ex-governor and eco-warrior Skink and his trusty side-man, Highway Patrolman Jim Tile; or, as here, rather poignant references to Tommy Tigertail and Skip Wiley from way back in that first novel, p.150).
Characters from The Simpsons cartoon series
Characters tend to stand out form the general scum if they have one of two qualities:
- they conform to well-established thriller or Hollywood stereotypes: strong manly heroes like Mick Stranahan, hero of the previous novel, Skinny Dip, or corporate crooks such as Red Hammernut, or preening, cocky but ultimately weak cowards like the would-be wife-killer, Charles Perrone, also from Skinny Dip
- or they have grotesque qualities or meet a grotesque fate: such as the over-hairy man-bear ‘Tool’ in Skinny Dip, or the assassin in Double Whammy who is bitten by a pitbull whose jaws he can’t unclamp from his arm, even after he’s killed it, even after he’s sawed its head off, and so goes through the rest of the novel with a rotting dog’s head at the end of one arm
I suppose one way of accounting for the grotesque characters or events in Hiaasen (beside them being gruesomely funny in and of themselves) is the way their fictional garishness compensates for the general lack of psychological depth.
Plot developments
Honey Santana
As we read on we encounter Honey Santana’s back story. We learn about her impulsive marriage to a working man ten years older than her, Perry Skinner, dope smuggler, who discovers her wearing a prom dress by the side of the road next to the car where her drunken teenage prom date was busy throwing up (pages 121 to 123). Skinner took her away, they fell in love, he got busted for smuggling dope and served a few years inside, and was surprised to find Honey waiting for him when he got out (p.230). They got married, they had a son Fry and then her mental disorder, some kind of bipolar condition, never officially defined (her ‘manic spirals’), became steadily worse, till they parted by mutual consent.
One among the many symptoms her son has learned to recognise is when Honey can barely hear anything around her because of the deafening noise going on in her head, ‘the rising babel in Honey’s skull’ (p.171), being combinations of multiple pop music tracks playing inside her head at the same time (for example, ‘Bell Bottom Blues’ at the same time as ‘Karma Chamelon’, p.125, or a disco track and CSN’s ‘Marrakesh Express’, p.82, Smoke on the Water and ‘Rainy Days and Mondays’, p.170, Nat King Cole and Marilyn Manson, p.214).
(It’s noteworthy that Hiaasen had used this riff in the previous novel, Skinny Dip, where Skink, his most frequent recurring character, was having exactly the same problem, of hearing two loud and catchy pop tunes playing inside his head at the same time. I wonder whether the repeat of this idea is an indication that Hiaasen himself suffered from a similar condition. Or just the repetition of quite a good bizarre character angle. Odd that he uses it in two consecutive books, though, as if we wouldn’t notice.)
Honey conceives a Cunning Plan to take revenge on Boyd Shreave. Once she’s got his phone number she rings him at home, herself pretending to be a real estate salesperson with the made-up name Pia Frampton (p.170). She spins him a line about how lucky buyers will get an all-expenses paid trip to stay in a wildlife lodge in Florida (remember that Boyd, Mrs Boyd and Eugenie all live up in Texas) and gets Boyd hooked. He thinks a city break for 2 in Florida is just what he needs to restart his relationship with Eugenie.
Eugenie
For her part Eugenie has already moved on and has seduced a new guy at work, Sacco, who she gets back to her flat and naked but he won’t stop talking about his obsessions with Bill Gates and Microsoft, so she’s becoming exasperated which is exactly when Boyd knocks on the door with a bunch of flowers and the offer of an all-expenses paid trip to Florida. Eugenie thinks, Well, why not?
Honey’s scam and Richard’s airmiles
So now Honey has suckered Boyd to think he’s going on an all-expenses-paid weekend break to a luxury Florida hotel, how is (slightly demented) Honey going to arrange all this? First the air tickets. She phones her successful journalist brother and persuades him to part with enough airmiles to pay for the 2 American Airlines tickets which she sends to Boyd.
As to the hotel, well, er… She lies to her son, Fry, that she’s got friends coming to stay and paints her double-wide trailer amateurish pictures of macaws and tropical foliage. Ha! Then she gets the boy’s father, Skinner, to take him for a few days, and sits back to wait for Boyd and Eugenie to arrive and their ritual humiliation to begin.
Lily and Dealey
Complicating things nicely is Boyd’s wife, Lily. Lily has all the evidence she needs that Boyd is being unfaithful, but flabbergasts the private investigator, Dealey, by telling him a photo of her husband getting a blowjob in a car park is not enough. She wants a photo of actual penetration. Dealey starts to protest but Lily says she’ll pay him $10,000 cash for it. She is good for the money because she runs a little chain of pizza parlours which she is on the brink of selling to a larger chain for a big figure plus stock options.
So, very reluctantly, Dealey establishes what flight Boyd and Eugenie are getting, books himself onto it, and sets off on his quest to take a photo of them unambiguously having penetrative sex for his client.
Boyd’s excuses
What lies is Boyd going to tell Lily to excuse his absence for a couple of days? He comes up with the story that he is not only still employed by Relentless Inc. but is their star salesman, but, alas, has only just been diagnosed with the very rare condition of aphenphosmphobia (page 122) which means he can’t bear to be touched. So work are going to send him to Florida to visit a clinic which may be able to cure his sad condition.
Lily knows he’s lying and so sets out to torment him, by presenting herself in sexually alluring guises i.e. in bra and panties, in skimpy thongs, and in one memorably pornographic scene, tells Boyd to sit on the sofa, close his eyes, and focus on the fact that she is not wearing any panties (p.132) to focus on her pussy, imagine her shape, the outline of her vulva against her tight jeans in its ‘velvet detail’… then Boyd hears the sound of her slipping out of her jeans and he opens her eyes to see his wife’s naked pussy only yards from him as he nurses what is by now a rearing and straining erection.
But now he’s come up with this preposterous phobia story, he has to stick to it and resist even Lily’s crudest advances. Comedy of a not particularly subtle type.
Sammy and Ginny
Remember how we left Sammy Tigertail canoeing deeper and deeper into the Florida Everglades? He’s not a very competent Indian, much though he wants to emulate his heroic Seminole ancestors. We learn that Sammy’s daddy was a white truck driver who impregnated an Indian woman but, when he was born, took him away to live with him and his white stepmom. They brought him up as a white boy named ‘Chad McQueen’ in the suburb of Broward, till the old guy died from a heart attack on a friend’s stag night, whereupon his Indian mom reclaimed him and took him to live in the Indian community of Big Cypress.
But the rest of the Indian community regarded him as not part of it, both on account of his half-white parentage and also that he seems to be endlessly unlucky (p.163). Sammy thinks of himself as ‘a fucked-up half-breed’ (p.286); ‘I’m only half Seminole… My father was white’ (p.309) and the narrator agrees he is dogged by ‘chronic bad luck’, (p.330).
Above all, Sammy is self-conscious and sensitive about his bright blue eyes, a permanent reminder that he is not pure-blood Indian (p.331).
Proving his bad luck, while he sleeps on an island that first night on the run, a high tide washes away his canoe. But then he hears noises coming from the other side of the island, sneaks over and discovers a fraternity party of students dancing to a boogie box round a campfire, stoned and drunk.
When they’ve all eventually passed out, Sammy tiptoes round to their canoes and starts to steal one. But he is stopped by a voice from among the comatose bodies, a girl’s voice, asking if she can come with him. It belongs to a girl whose name we will discover is Gillian St Croix.
Just as Honey’s prom night date turned out to be useless all those years ago, now this girl, Gillian St Croix (full name p.141; fully backstory p.172), also wants to get away from the lame man who brought her to the island, Ethan.
— Useless men. This is a recurring theme. Pieback, Boyd and Dealey are sorry apologies for masculinity and their womenfolk have correspondingly low opinions of the male sex.
‘One time a guy almost croaked on me in bed,’ [Eugenie] was saying. ‘Lucky I’d passed a CPR class. I kept him goin’ till the paramedics got there, and guess what? He still had his hard-on when they carried him out on the stretcher – that’s all you need to know about men.’ (p.277)
Sammy whispers no way is he going to take her, but Gillian threatens to scream and wake her comatose student buddies up, so, with massive reluctance, Sammy puts her in the canoe, stops once safe round round the headland, then fires a few shots of the rifle to wake the dopey students up, making them panic and hurriedly dress and head off in the remaining canoes.
Which leaves Sammy stuck with Gillian, who turns out to be an incredibly irritating chatterbox, who only stops wittering on when Sammy ties her hands and stuffs a sock in her mouth. But not for long. He paddles blindly for a while, having no compass or map of familiarity with this area, eventually arriving at a remote island called Dismal Key (p.136), though neither of them know it.
Clearly the four storylines of:
- Honey Santana setting up Body Shreave for some merciless humiliation at her trailer in Florida
- private detective Dealey’s attempts to photograph Boyd and Eugenie in flagrante
- Tommy Tigertail and his annoying ‘kidnap’ victim, Gillian, who refuses to leave him alone
- Perry Skinner and his son Fry
are going to crash into each other and create all kinds of comic complications. Nature Girl is very well written, elaborately structured, with detailed characterisation, snappy dialogue, vivid imagining of the exotic and outlandish scenes and settings. But somehow, hard to nail down, it lacks the really vehement outrageousness of the earlier novels.
Native American themes
All Hiaasen’s novels are interspersed with factual interludes giving backgrounders on the big issue of the novel. If they were in magazines, they’d be in call-out boxes or side panels, separate from the main text. In the previous novel, Skinny Dip, there were 3 or 4 of them explaining how the runoff of fertilisers and pesticides from vast agricultural landholdings were allowed to illegally leach into the Everglades and destroy their ecosystems.
In this novel we get a series of interludes giving factual background about native American tribes, namely the Seminole nation, which Sammy belongs to (pages 72, 152, 286), also background history of the Calusa people who inhabited Florida at the time of the Spanish conquest and who were decimated by European diseases (pages 202 to 203).
Native American themes are present in other ways throughout the book:
1. Sammy has vivid dreams, dreams in which spirits appear and talk to him, most notably dreams in which the spirit of the dead white man Jeter Wilson appears to him and complains about being weighted down with anchors in some canal where the water’s cold and he’s being bitten to pieces by sharks. In these dreams Wilson angrily asks Sammy to come back and move his body. Later, when Dealey pitches up on the island where Sammy’s taken Gillian, Sammy refuses to believe he’s real, considering him a spirit throughout all their interactions, which is both comic and genuinely a bit spooky. Thus Sammy’s dreams are so vivid that at several points he mistakes people, for example Gillian when she first speaks, for spirits talking to him.
2. Dismal Key turns out to be largely constructed of clam shells by the Indian tribes who lived in this part of Florida for over a thousand years, the Calusa people (p.175) and the story of how they dominated the area but were then wiped out by the diseases brought by the Spanish invaders is not only tragic, but also spooky. For Sammy, their long-gone presence still weighs heavily on his mind.
3. Sammy is also haunted by the memory of his great-great-great-grandfather, Chief Thlocklo Tustenuggee, tricked into signing a treaty with the white man then thrown into prison.
Manifest destiny, otherwise known as screwing native peoples out of their homelands, had been a holy crusade among white people of that era. (p.361)
4. One of these factual callout boxes explains the rise of the casinos and gambling empires which native Americans have built on their reservations to sucker gambling-addicted white folks out of their money (p.357), Many Indians have become very wealthy this way, Sammy describes them as the ‘new Arabs’ in terms of mushroom wealth. Sammy’s uncle Tommy, who we met way back in Hiaasen’s debut novel, is credited with being one of the architects of the Seminole nation’s rise to enormous wealth.
Once written off as a ragged band of heathens, the Seminole Nation grew into a formidable corporate power with its own brigade of lawyers and lobbyists. (p.357)
5. On a personal level, Gillian and Sammy spend a lot of time together and their conversation repeatedly rotates around the issue of ‘race’, her teasing him about having white girlfriends, he very self-conscious of his half-white heritage, determined not to submit to what his uncle calls white pussy’. Whenever we enter Sammy’s storyline, the word ‘white’ recurs almost continually, and white people don’t come out well in Sammy’s worldview:
The first white person to betray Sammy Tigertail had been his stepmother… The second white person to betray him had been Cindy, his ex-girlfriend… (p.356)
The book bangs on, again and again, that you can’t trust white people and you can’t trust men, impeccably woke anti-men and anti-white attitudes but, as so often, expressed, without a shred of irony, by a…er… white man.
Nature Girl can may be considered Hiaasen’s novel about native Americans (in Florida), their history and current plight (Sammy’s mixed-blood heritage symbolises the way they’re caught between dying notions of their old culture and their full absorption into the capitalist white world) in maybe the same way that Lucky You is his novel about black people, with its feisty black heroine JoLayne and its pair of repellent white supremacists, Bode Gazzer and Chub, whose beliefs, values and temperaments are systematically ripped to shreds. (Note, again, the same tendency of the characterisations in Lucky You: black woman clever and good; white men very bad and very stupid.)
I’m not criticising or damning Hiaasen for the way the themes of race and gender run very loud through his novels. I’m just pointing out how their prominence reflects how dominant they have become in an American society which, over the period he’s been writing in (1986 to the present), he himself is the first to point out has become utterly dysfunctional through the triumph of greed and selfishness, the disappearance of manners and kindness.
In my opinion the two phenomena are connected, and represent twin aspects of a culture and society becoming ever-more putrid. Funny reading about it, but I wouldn’t want to live there, amid the ever-increasing inequality, violence and cultural disintegration.
Highlights of the rest of the novel
Boyd and Eugenie fly down to Florida and catch a cab to the address on the holiday brochure Honey has knocked up and mailed them. You can imagine that they are vastly disillusioned to arrive at Honey’s badly painted trashy trailer and discover that this is the destination of their supposed dream holiday. Eugenie is all for turning round and going straight back to the airport but a) it is now late at night b) it is raining c) Boyd is a cheapskate and despite the obvious crappiness of the situation, insists that they accept Honey’s ‘welcome’ and put up for the night in the trailer’s none -too-clean double bed.
Meanwhile, the private investigator Dealey had been on the same flight as Boyd and Eugenie and trailed them to this trailer park. He is loitering outside Honey’s trailer and is just peeking through a window, when he is surprised from behind by a guy with a shotgun. It turns out to be Mr Piejack from the fish market. He’s in bad shape. Not only did Honey hit him in the nuts with a crab-cracking hammer, but a day later some Latinos turned up and forced Piejack’s hand into a basket of angry live crabs. His screams brought colleagues and then paramedics who hammer the crabs off his fingers, but many of them are clinging onto his fingers. I.e. the fingers of his right hand are all severed. Paramedics rush Piejack to a hospital where an incompetent surgeon sews them back onto the wrong stumps, his thumb being reattached to his little finger stump.
There’s generally one major grotesque incident in a Hiaasen novel and this is it, the case of the wrongly sewn-on fingers. Despite this grotesque mishap, Piejack is more sexually obsessed by Honey than ever (backstory about PIejack, his fishy career and miserable marriage pages 248 to 250). Piejack takes Dealey off at gunpoint…
Next morning, Honey tells Boyd and Eugenie that the next part of the ‘holiday’ is packing some bags and going kayaking along nearby waterways, which Eugenie is rightly suspicious of, but Boyd insists they play along. Truth is Honey doesn’t know exactly where she is going and they kayak badly for a few hours till they arrive at an island in the middle of nowhere.
Little are they to know that this is the exact same island where Sammy Tigertail has brought irritating Gillian, who won’t stop talking, who keeps teasing Sammy about her whiteness, who keeps provoking him with her semi-nudity and asking why he won’t ‘bone’ her.
So that’s two of the groups of characters on the island. The third set consist of the sex-obsessed Piejack and Dealey. Having kept him under guard all night, next morning Pijack forces Dealey to accompany him as they drive to a boat hire place, rent a powerboat and set off to follow Honey and her two luckless kayakers to the unknown island.
Piejack and Dealey are able pick them up using binoculars, then trail them at a distance so as not to be seen and moor their boat on the other side of the island. Things quickly go wrong when Piejack, in the middle of threatening Dealey, is whacked from behind by Sammy, falling into a dense cactus patch. Sammy thinks he’s killed Piejack (damn! the second white man he’s killed in just a few days!) and takes Dealey off with him, poor Dealey, as one character comments, maybe the only person in history to be kidnapped twice in one day!
But that’s not all. The fourth component is Honey’s ex-husband Perry Skinner, the crab fisherman. That morning he spotted Piejack driving with a stranger through the streets of Everglade City (the tiny rural community where Honey and Perry live), realises something is up, quickly picks up his son, and takes out his crabbing boat to pursue Piejack and Dealey in their boat, at a safe distance.
And thus the narrative brings all four sets of characters – Sammy and Gillian; Honey, Boyd and Eugenie; Piejack and Dealey; Perry and his son – to the same remote, mosquito-infested island, with what blurb writers would call ‘hilarious consequences’.
What ensues is almost textbook farce, with a complex series of comings and goings, encounters, violence, threats, running away, and the couples splitting up and partnering off with someone from another pair, comic misunderstandings and confrontations.
It could almost be performed onstage as a Feydeau farce, set in one big room with multiple doors, and characters entering in various combinations, having comical mishaps before exiting and another little set of characters entering to perform their comic scene. The fact that it’s set on an island with four sets of characters and a lot of rueful comedy reminded me a little of The Tempest.
Among a welter of incidents, Boyd, the soulless lunkhead, manages to tazer his own penis. (He thinks it’s a gun and shoves it down his pants like a tough guy only for it to go off accidentally. Men, eh?)
At one point Sammy is confronted in the middle of the day with dead Mr Wilson’s spirit, whining about being stuck in the cold water and eaten by sharks. To get rid of it Sammy shoots his rifle but the bullet ricochets off a tree and hits Dealey, shattering his shoulder. He collapses, loses consciousness, the women tend him but he’s in a poor way.
In other scenes, Gillian wears Sammy down with her incessant chatter till he gives up and agrees to have sex with her, which mainly involves her vigorously riding his erection while continuing her endless chatter.
Boyd demonstrates in a hundred ways what a selfish, useless, spineless, soulless goon he is. Honey had arranged this whole scam in order to get Boyd into the back of beyond and then deliver a lecture about his bad morals and behaviour re. his rude telesales phone call to her which is where the entire narrative began.
And yet, when it comes to it, nothing works. As dawn rises the day after they came to the island, Honey marvels at the change in the quality of the light, the calmness of the water, the beauty of a flight of egrets across the sky. Boyd doesn’t get it, and announces he needs to have a crap.
The man was unreachable, a dry hole. For such a lunkhead there could be no awakening, no rebirth of wonderment. (p.296)
On one level the novel is simply about a mentally ill woman who tries to reform a soulless dolt and fails, leaving her feeling ‘foolhardy and defeated, the queen of lost causes’ (p.297). (By the way, Honey appears to be the ‘nature girl’ of the title.)
On day one on the island Sammy had snuck up on Piejack while the latter was pointing his shotgun at Dealey and whacked him real hard. Piejack was out for a long time, finally came to and crawled off to hide in a cistern tank where he fell on cactus, managing to get covered in prickles. Also a colony of fire ants discovers the juicy food of his recently transplanted fingers under the surgical gauze.
Thus he awakes on the second day on the island looking like a drooling, demented walking puffer fish ‘benumbed by the derangement of lust’ (p.302). He has metamorphosed into the Grotesque Figure who can be found in most of Hiaasen’s novels (cf Chemo, Tool etc al.) Piejack stumbles across Honey alone in her camp and kidnaps her, fitting a noose round her neck and dragging her off into the undergrowth.
Meanwhile, a coast guard helicopter arrives. Dealey had phoned for it with the last power in his cell phone.
Perry Skinner, who, despite his former prison sentence, emerges as the strong, manly hero of the book, doesn’t want to leave the island till he’s found his ex-wife, Honey, who he still loves. On the other hand he’s sort of in charge of the good guys and knows that Dealey is badly wounded by Sammy’s shot to his shoulder and so needs to be choppered out.
So he and Gillian and Sammy put Dealey’s half-conscious body into one of the brightly coloured kayaks and push it out into the main body of water where the coastguard quickly see it. Unfortunately, as the chopper hovers low, Dealey tries to stand up to signal to it and promptly capsizes the kayak, flailing in the water and likely to drown. So Gillian quickly strips to her mesh panties (for the umpteenth time) and swims out to save him. So she and Dealey are winched to safety by the coastguard chopper which flies away. Shame. Sammy was just starting to like her.
In another part of the island, Eugenie had been tending Skinner’s son, Fry, who is only 12 and managed to hit a truck while skateboarding before his dad collected him and brought him on this wild goose chase to some remote island in the Everglades.
Here, Fry has begun to suffer symptoms of concussion and gotten separated from his dad (I told you it’s a labyrinthine series of people getting split up, lost, encountering people from the other groups, with or without guns).
Fry has just fainted and been discovered by Eugenie, who is tending him when they both hear the Coast Guard chopper. Fry tells her not to worry about him and go and so, reluctantly, Eugenie runs off in the direction of the creek where the Coast Guard has spotted Dealey flailing round his kayak and Gillian swimming out to save him.
The narrative then cuts away to a factual account of the precise make and number of Coast Guard patrol, and explains how it had been called to the island after Dealey rang Lily Shreave (his client, remember; the one who sent him to get photos of Boyd actually penetrating Eugenie), describes how he has been kidnapped and brought to some godforsaken island in the ‘Glades. Lily rang the coastguard. Hence the helicopter.
Anyway, the net result is that by page 320 Eugenie, Gillian and Dealey have been choppered back to civilisation.
Leaving Sammy Tigertail and Perry Skinner and the latter’s ill son, Fry, looking for the gruesomely maimed pervert Piejack and Honey, who he’s kidnapped and is leading around on a leash, with the cowardly Boyd blundering around as a kind of wild card.
There is no subtlety about the characterisation. The narrator describes Boyd as a drooling moron, explaining to the reader at factual length what a GPS tracker is and why Boyd had to be an imbecile not to realise what it was and to mistake it for a radio (p.322). And he tazered his own penis.
Sorry apologies for men
Hiaasen’s novels usually have a central topic which is the butt of his factual exposures and satirical flaying. About half way through this book I began to wonder whether the subject being flayed in this one is men and masculinity. Boyd the useless creep. Piejack the pervert. Dealey the craven investigator. The narrative marshals a long list of evidence against men.
Eugenie remembers her former lover, Van Bonneville, who was useless the one and only time they had sex, and then didn’t get any better in the sack after she discovered he had murdered his wife.
We get a vivid scene where Eugenie tries to seduce Boyd’s replacement at the telesales centre, Sacco, who turns out to be a knock-kneed obsessive.
The text keeps up a steady barrage of criticism of the entire male gender, either via the narrator or the no-holds-barred comments of all the female characters:
Honey’s outlook on men was sinking to a point of abject revulsion. The day was new, and yet already she’d been ridiculed by a soulless twit and kidnapped by a reeking pervert. (p.304)
‘Don’t ever change,’ [Eugenie tells Fry]. ‘By that I mean don’t grow up to be a jerkoff like ninety percent of the men I meet.’
‘Mom always tells me the same thing, except she says it’s more like ninety-five.’ (p.307)
‘Don’t be a typical dumb-ass male and get yourself lost in the woods.’ (p.318)
Even the natural world is roped in to make the point. When Fry points out two chameleons on a branch to Eugenie he explains that the one puffing out its chest and doing what look like little press-ups is the male doing a mating dance.
‘That’s the male,’ said Fry. ‘He’s showin’ off.’
‘Go figure,’ said Eugenie. (p.316)
I wonder if an author wrote a book in which characters said 95% of the black people they met were jerkoffs, black people show off all the time, one character told another not to be a typical dumb-ass black, and so on – I wonder whether sweeping abuse and insults about blacks or Jews or Muslims would be seen as quite so funny as sweeping insults and abuse of white men.
When the narrative stops to reflect on the five men Honey dated after divorcing Perry, it’s really just another opportunity to give examples of piss-poor men, namely:
- Dale Rozelle, ‘a duplicitous shithead’, who lies about being a member of the Sierra Club in order to get into Honey’s pants (or get her to ‘give up the velvet’), slaps his own bum and makes barnyard noises during sex (now there’s something I must try out :)).
- Dr Tyler Teehorn, her son’s orthodontist, who she gives a ‘mercy fuck’ after his wife left him, but who then clings to her like a mollusc and is a suffocating bore.
When the Coast Guard helicopter appears, Hiaasen makes a joke of the way the routine rescue of a fat white guy in a kayak is transformed when the crew see a nubile woman strip virtually naked (down to just her mesh panties, for it is Gillian) and another hottie waving brightly coloured underwear at them (Eugenie). These sights invigorate the male rescuers, lending them, in the sardonic tones of the narrator, ‘unbreakable focus and esprit de corps‘ (p.323).
Gillian went on, ‘Ethan doesn’t really care about me. It’s just the sex.’
‘Well, he’s a boy.’
‘Why are they all like that?’ (p.364)
Men, eh. Do anything for the promise of poon. Pathetic. In the last hundred pages I collected adjectives used to describe men: lame (345) sonofabitches (351) bores (325), shitheads (324), schmucks, bumblefucks (343), sexual harassers (344), sex fiends (347), toads (352), dumb-ass drooling morons (322), brutish criminals (350) and rancid buckets of scum (347).
Admittedly most of this abuse is targeted at Piejack, the gangrenous, drug-addled, sex-obsessed stalker, but then he was invented precisely to be the butt of this torrent of anti-male abuse. And is unsubtly contrasted with the sterling qualities of the three female leads: confident knows-what-she-wants Gillian; tall, sexy Eugenie; and Honey, the nature girl who wanted to reform slimy Boyd Shreaver, who is a super-devoted loving mother to young Fry, and is ‘tough and outspoken and damn near fearless’ (p.355). Shit men, heroic women.
It’s a tiny comic detail when the Coast Guard tells Gillian that the single most common name men gave their dinghies and boats in Florida is Wet Dream (p.338). Ha ha. Men and their dicks and their dumb-ass sense of humour, eh.
One last thought: it isn’t a new theme for Hiaasen. Reviewing my notes on Strip Tease, I see that that novel, also, as you’d expect from a text all about the ‘erotic dancing’ industry, was crammed full of dismissive comments about men and their desperation for pussy.
- ‘Men will try anything,’ Monique Jr said, sceptically. ‘Anything for pussy.’ (Strip Tease, page 16)
- It taught Erin one of life’s great lessons: an attractive woman could get whatever she wanted, because men are so laughably weak. They would do anything for even the distant promise of sex. (p.26)
- Erin was constantly reminded of the ridiculous power of sex; routine female nakedness reduced some men to stammering, clammy-fingered fools. (p.87)
Is this general statement true of men in the real world? Is it true for all men even just in Carl Hiaasen’s novels? Or is it a kind of satirical trope, the kind of predictable, fixed parameter which then enables savage satire to be written, alongside other generalisations such as all white people are racist, all politicians are corrupt, all property developers are evil, and so on.
In other words they are conventions of the genre. Certainly having read a dozen or so Restoration comedies a while ago, and then a set of Ben Jonson’s citizen comedies, sex and, more precisely, the sex-obsession of some men has always been a theme of comedy, and is cranked up to the max in the over-driven form of comedy which is farce.
The climax – Skinner kills Piejack
The climax of the novel comes when Skinner and Sammy come into a beach clearing to discover lurid, ill Piejack threatening Honey with the shotgun and ordering her to strip. Honey’s son, Fry, who got separated from his dad some time back, has snuck up behind Piejack and hits him with a plank but Piejack recovers and points the shotgun at both Fry and Honey.
Seeing this from the trees, Skinner goes running forward but Piejack shoots him in the knee, forcing him to flop to the sand. That just leaves Sammy, still standing on the edge of the clearing, witness to the entire scene, who has to make a choice. In his head he hears his wise uncle saying this is all white people craziness and that he should walk away, and Piejack points the gun at him and tells him to do just that.
Now, among his personal belongings which his half-brother Lee had brought him to take into the boondocks right at the start of the story, was a lovely Gibson guitar (which he can’t actually play, although Gillian turns out to be able to play it).
Now Sammy sees the guitar has gotten tossed to one side of the beach and politely asks Piejack if he can retrieve it. He walks across with Piejack keeping the shotgun aimed at him, picks up the guitar walks a few paces but then, unexpectedly, hands it to Skinner, still on his knees. Skinner labours to his feet, staggers forward and, as Piejack shoots him, brings the guitar down like an axe and cleaves Piejack’s skull in two.
Postscript
So that’s the end of the jeopardy which had been driving the plot for the previous 100 pages. Now there’s just tying up the loose ends.
We are told Piejack’s last shot blew away part of Skinner’s hip and he is bleeding badly. Honey and Fry carry him to Piejack’s hire boat and she charts a course back to the dock at Everglades City and tells Fry to run as fast as the wind to get help and call an ambulance.
Sammy Tigertail loads Piejack’s corpse into a different boat and chugs back to the canal where he sank the body of Jeter Wilson. He does the same to Piejack’s corpse, stringing it with weights and dumping it in the same deep underwater hole. Almost immediately he starts seeing Jeter Wilson’s death spirit appearing to him, complaining about his new companion.
All this leaves flabby Boyd the coward still on the island. He had climbed up a huge poinciana tree to escape from the general mayhem and from up there he’d tried to the Coast Guard helicopter, though the pilots were, as Hiaasen emphasises, totally entranced when they saw the prospect of picking up not one but two scantily clad women.
When he hears the two shots Piejack fires, Boyd heads off in the opposite direction, eventually hitting another beach and discovering an untended canoe. He quickly sets off but is, of course, useless at paddling, plus night is falling.
In the middle of the night he hears a boat passing nearby and shines a small torch he has, but it is only Sammy in a powerboat towing the body of Piejack and the rest of the canoes, and he flips Boyd the bird, and putters off, leaving Boyd literally all at sea.
The First Resurrectionist Maritime Assembly for God
Then there is a weird comic afterlude. Boyd comes to a beach and finds himself landing on another island. Much earlier in the story Perry and Fry, in search of Honey, had briefly landed on this island and discovered it was being used as a retreat by a small group of revivalist Christians, to be precise, five members of the First Resurrectionist Maritime Assembly for God wearing only white gowns (p.371).
It had already been hinted that these folk are not as pure as they claim to be and, sure enough, Boyd staggers out of his canoe onto the beach and interrupts the Assembly’s leader, Brother Manual, gripping Sister Shirelle by the hips and boning her enthusiastically from behind. Hiaasen points out that Sister Shirelle’s formidable and unbound breasts are jouncing in tandem, which is good to know.
There follows an unexpected passage of broad, farcical satire, as Manuel and Shirelle hurriedly make themselves decent and greet Boyd (almost naked, with hands bloodied from climbing up then back down the big poinciana tree) as the Promised One and the Messiah. For a few days they devout Bible bashers worship, feed and water him. But Boyd turns out to be an obnoxious whiner and even the most deluded devotees quickly lose faith. The congregation depart the island leaving him with a few rations but no canoe.
Boyd is leaning back against the big cross the Assembly had erected on the beach in bleak despair when a huge wild eagle lands on its top and takes a big dump on him. Comedy.
He runs into the sea to wash himself and makes such a racket and commotion that he is spotted and picked up by Coastal Rangers out on patrol, returned to civilisation, hosed down, dressed in charity clothes.
Boyd‘s storyline comes to a savagely farcical conclusion when, thus tidied up, he is enjoying a few beers in a local bar when he overhears some tourists from up north fantasising about moving to the Sunshine State. Boyd smoothly introduces himself as the agent for some (totally fictional) prime beachfront properties and realises with a flash that this is the role which suits his worthless, soulless, slimeball character – he will be an estate agent in Florida!
Eugenie, Sammy and Skinner
Talking of agents, Eugenie quits her job in telesales and presents herself at the office of private investigator Dealey, now much restored after an operation to repair his shot-up shoulder.
Eugenie suggests that, after all the fuss and bother, they send Boyd’s wife, Lily, not a video of Boyd and herself boning, but a video she shot during the brief time she spent with young Fry, a sequence of two chameleons copulating on a tree branch. (Right till the end of this book, ‘boning’ in one form or another is the central subject.) Impressed by her confidence, sales skills and insights into relationships, Dealey decides to take her on as a partner in his detective agency.
Sammy finds peace on another island. He had recovered some parts of the smashed Gibson guitar after it was used to brain Piejack, and starts whittling a new body from treewood. He fishes, cooks and eats, lies under the huge sprawl of night-time stars. The same great eagle which shat on Boyd comes and roosts in the trees every evening. Sammy begins to think of him as a guardian spirit. Slowly, we get the sense of him becoming attuned to the wilderness and the simple life of his ancestors. A fairly happy ending.
And Skinner and Honey get back together. Her jaw is clamped shut while it heals from an almighty whack Piejack gave it back on the island which broke it, and Skinner is walking with a cane while his new artificial hip beds in, so they decided to move back in together and look after each other.
Twelve-and-a-half-year-old Fry is anxious that they’ll just end up arguing and splitting up again. But the novel ends with a symbolic scene. Once again Fry and Honey are sitting at dinner (with Skinner) when the phone rings. Honey gets irate about dinner being interrupted, just as she did at the very start of the novel.
However, both Fry and Skinner tell her to let it ring, let it go. It’s hard for such an obsessive, but Honey takes their advice and eventually it stops. People don’t really change, but they can learn new tricks. The book ends with the happy family joking together over dinner.
Construction
It should be obvious from this detailed summary that this novel, like all Hiaasen’s novels, is wonderfully constructed, the multiple storylines and the complex backstories of its large-ish cast of characters beautifully dovetailed and woven together by a master carpenter. He is an absolute master of narrative construction, it’s one of the most impressive things about his books.
More sex than previously
It might just be me, but it seemed to me that sex – almost pornographically explicit imaginings of naked pussies and willies, and jokey references to cocks and fannies and thongs and bras and breasts and vibrators – is far more present in this novel than any of the previous ones.
‘I’d blow Dick Cheney for a Corona,’ she said. (p.225)
We are casually told Eugenie loves straddling Boyd’s cock and was, indeed, starting to do the same to his replacement, Sacco, when the front door rings. Lily tries repeatedly to provoke Boyd into having sex with her, wearing thongs, straddling him, slipping under the table at a restaurant, unzipping his flies and starting to suck his cock. Later in the story, they haven’t been together long before irritating Gillian (see below) is presenting herself to Sammy Tigertail in ‘mesh panties and a white bikini top’ (p.163) to arouse him.
‘White pussy is bad medicine.’ (Tommy Tigertail, p.142)
All three of the women in the book – Honey, Eugenie and Gillian – are not only described as attractive:
- ‘Sammy Tigertail had never seen a woman so lovely’ as Honey (p.290)
- when the Coast Guard appear at the end of the story it is to rescue ‘two extremely attractive female evacuees’ (p.323)
- Honey is ‘athletically built’ (p.358)
But are impressively sexually active. They are tall and shapely, with nice boobs (Eugenie has ‘outstanding breasts’, in Fry’s opinion, p.316), are continually slipping into thongs and mesh panties, offering blowjobs at the drop of a hat.
I know these are comic, escapist poolside paperbacks, but there does seem to be a more than usually amount of male wish fulfilment in this one.
Eugenie chuckled tiredly. ‘I’ll do whatever it takes to get off this island, and that includes hand jobs, blow jobs, butt jobs, even singin’ opera stark naked.’ (p.279)
When Sammy stumbles late at night into the little camp Honey, Eugenie and Boyd have made, he accidentally wakens Eugenie, who begs him for water, since they’re all thirsty. And she immediately offers to anything – ‘I’ll do whatever you want. And I mean whatever‘. She is, after all, very proud of her metal tongue stud and the pleasure it gives the men she fellates.
I suppose Eugenie leaping immediately to offer sex at every opportunity is meant to be a comic part of her over-sexed character. But they’re all obsessed with sex, Piejack and Boyd and Lily, who is obsessed with seeing photos of her husband penetrating another woman, and Gillian uses every opportunity to propose sex to her handsome half-Indian abductor:
‘Meanwhile, Big Chief Thlocko, let me show you what my people call a “quickie”.’ (p.310)
Even the comic details have a more than usually sexual tinge: for example, part of Boyd’s general uselessness is the way he once had a domestic accident in such a way as to straddle a cactus and get his entire groin studded with painful cactus needles (p.341).
When they get to Dismal Island Boyd brandishes the implement he found under Honey’s bed and which he takes to be a gun, swirling it round his hand before sticking it back in his pants, like a tough guy with a revolver, only for it to jolt him with a phenomenal electric shock because it was not a gun but a taser; leaving him with ‘a half-barbecued cock’ (p.239).
We are told that the PI Dealey has only ever been subject to violence once in his career and, you could imagine thousands of forms this could take, but it is entirely in line with the book’s focus on sex that this attack took the shape of the woman he was illicitly photographing as part of a snooping job, spotting him and throwing her nine inch vibrator at him. (It hit him directly in the throat and he couldn’t speak for three weeks, p.196.)
‘Damn, boy, you could be quite the rock star… All the free poon and dope you can stand.’ (p.226)
When Boyd and Eugenie are paddling a two-person canoe, Boyd is so useless that Eugenie wants him to stop altogether. There are many ways she could do this, starting with using the gift of speech. Instead, it’s very much in line with the soft porn vibe of the book, that she prefers to express this wish by taking off her halter top so as to be topless. This appearance of her boobs distracts Boyd so much that he stops paddling alright, but it also… continues the tone of titillation which colours the whole text.
When Skinner and Fry come ashore on a remote island attracted by a fire on the beach, they discover it is in fact a small group of Christian zealots holding an unorthodox act of worship. The point is the narrator draws our attention to the fact that the prettiest one, Shirelle is dancing and gyrating without a bra… and when the leader of the congregation follows them to give them a leaflet, Skinner angrily confronts him with the shrewd guess that he has ‘balled’ Sister Shirelle, that she has kneeled down and worshipped him in a very special way (p.258). And, as we’ve seen, at the end of the book Boyd interrupts the group’s leader in the act of energetically boning Shirelle from behind. Of the religious devotee Sister Shirelle, not only do we learn that her big breasts jounce joyfully around but that, in Brother Manuel’s opinion, she would ‘go down on Judas Iscariot if he was a hottie’ (p.385).
And the entire character of Mr Piejack, the lecherous manager of the fish market who fires Honey after he grabs her breast as she’s placing fresh wahoo steaks on display, such that she turns round and hammers in the nuts (p.232), he is nothing more than sexual obsession personified. He goes to ridiculous lengths to try and see Honey nude and/or touch her, he is a slavering stalker, who’s played for laughs, but is also one more strand of the novel’s sex-obsession. When he abducts Honey, he says he’ll only turn her loose if she promises to ‘give up the velvet’ in a particularly creepy and repellent way (p.304).
Eventually, Gillian (the ‘rambunctious college girl in mesh panties’, p.394) wears Sammy down and he gives in to having sex with her, which is described as her boisterously riding him. That’s the sex position of choice in Hiaasen’s novels, in which all the female characters are depicted as modern, liberated and active, rather than passive recipients.
What stood out in this particular description is the way Hiaasen goes out of his way to describe the way Gillian clenches her cervical muscle around Sammy’s cock, describing it not once but twice (p.287) – just that bit more pornographic detail than we’ve had in the previous novels.
Boyd lies to his wife that his work are sending him to a special clinic in Florida to be cured of his aphenphosmphobia and she pretends to go along with the story, all the while knowing she’s sending Dealey the private dick to photograph his penetration of his mistress. This is the precise term that is used, repeatedly, on pages 112, 113, 115, 147. Lily rings up Dealey to check: ‘Penetration? You got penetration?’, p.242.) Lily wants an unambiguous photo of her husband’s cock entering his mistress’s vulva. If Dealey is unsure how to get the shot, Lily tells Dealey to hire some porn and study the technique and the angles. Which he does and which the novels gives us descriptions of.
I think I know that lots of people are sex mad. It’s not such a novel or informative theme as the bass fishing in Double Whammy or the agricultural pollution in Skinny Dip or the plastic surgery industry in Skin Tight or the extended satire on tacky theme parks in Native Tongue or the detailed explanations of corrupt property development in Sick Puppy. What industry or sector is being satirised here? Telesales, maybe, a bit, at the start. But mostly it’s sex-obsessed creepy men.
A critic might say that all this titillation is here to make up for a slight lack of something else, the lack of a really meaty political or social subject.
Words for sex
Small thing but I was struck by the way lots of characters use the word ‘bone’ for the f word. ‘He just wanted to bone me’, ‘Has he boned her yet?’, ‘She’s paying you twenty-five grand to tape her old man boning some bimbo?’ (p.241) etc. Gillian calls Sammy ‘a serious blue-eyed Bone Machine’ (p.316). Presumably that’s why an erection is referred to as a ‘boner’, because it’s what men use for ‘boning’.
Other synonyms include the more traditional ‘ball’ (‘so I’d ball him’); ‘sleep with’, or just plain ‘do’.
‘I’m getting a complex,’ she said; ‘why aren’t you trying to do me?’ (p.245)
Whatever word is used, ‘boning’ or characters obsessing about ‘boning’, is a much more central theme to the novel than in previous ones. It’s all Gillian or Eugenie or Lily or Piejack or Boyd seem to think about.
Dad rock
Having established in previous novels that the narrator – or at least all his sympathetic characters – are fans of 1970s Adult-Oriented Rockers such as Neil Young and the Rolling Stones and Creedence Clearwater Revival, Hiaasen keeps up the Dad Rock ambience with references throughout this novel to more Dad Rock classics such as The Eagles (p.163), James Taylor (p.225), The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix (p.227), the Rolling Stones (p.245), Johnny Cash (p.266), the Allmann Brothers (p.312), Kiss (p.316), Neil Young again (p.393). Is it a deliberate marketing ploy, to appeal to boomer rock fans?
Having mulled it over, I think the recurring references to Dad Rock make up one of the 3 or 4 components of Hiaasen’s Good Place. Almost all Hiaasen’s energy goes into eviscerating the forces of evil and corruption at very great length, with often gruesome and violent consequences.
What is there to balance against a world of corruption and lies? Well, I think there is a handful of good things in Hiaasen’s world and good ole rock and roll is one of them. The epitome of Good is the image of the strong, competent, decent guy, Mick Stranahan (who features in Skin Tight and Skinny Dip) alone on his remote house built on stilts out in Biscayne Bay, quietly fishing with a loyal dog by his side and Neil Young on the cassette player as the dawn comes up over the ocean. Good times. Simple down-home values. Beautiful unspoilt scenery. Quiet fishing. Loyal dog. Cool sounds. Maybe light up a half-smoked doobie. Life is sweet. It is still possible to get away from all the crap, and the old-time music which recurs throughout the books are markers for that.
J.B.
Obligatory James Bond reference, p.303.
Credit
Nature Girl by Carl Hiaasen was published by Bantam Press in 2006. All references are to the 2007 Black Swan paperback edition.
Carl Hiaasen reviews
- Tourist Season (1986)
- Double Whammy (1987)
- Skin Tight (1989)
- Native Tongue (1991)
- Strip Tease (1993)
- Stormy Weather (1995)
- Lucky You (1997)
- Sick Puppy (2000)
- Basket Case (2002)
- Skinny Dip (2004)
- Nature Girl (2006)
- Star Island (2010)
- Bad Monkey (2013)
- Razor Girl (2016)
- Squeeze Me (2020)
Books & Boots 