It’s been a while since I’ve read a Hiaasen book. They are very funny, and I remember being hugely entertained, but the last one I finished was in 2023.
My journal says I started Powder Burns and didn’t finish it … I don’t remember why…
The book
For the first couple of pages I thought this one might make the “‘didn’t finish” list, but it got better quickly!
Scene 1:
- A weirdo named Dale Figgo picks up a hitchhiker heading to the interstate, but has to “do something first”.
- The thing he wants to do is leaflet a neighborhood with anti-Jewish hate leaflets. He drives and the hitchhiker offers to throws them.
- On the way out of the gated community, an irate resident accosts them, and Dale runs him over with his truck.
- The hitchhiker catches on that he is a crazy situation and wants out, so he hops out of the truck and runs away at the first opportunity.
- Lucky for him, this is the last we hear of him, he’s out of the story.
- Everyone else, including the run-over resident are around for the duration of our strange story.
Scene 2:
- We’re on a flight to Orlando.
- A man named Twilly Spree has scored an aisle seat.
- He starts shamelessly hitting on the woman across the aisle.
- Her name is Viva.
- Leaving the plane she leaves the New Yorker she was reading with her address on it on her plane seat.
That is NOT the kind of thing a street-wise attractive woman leave on her seat when she’d just escaped a creepy guy next to her on the plane.
[I found this fellow very off-putting from this introduction, but he turns out to be one of the main Good Guys in the whole story. It all comes together a few pages later.]
Scene 3
Viva rents the guest room at the house of the sketchy MAGA loser Dale we met in the first scene, just to tie it all together.
So now we’ve been introduced to the major players so we’re ready to go!
Here’s a bit of Hiaasen humor:
Viva thought Twilly looked like the author of a book she’d read:
How to let Happiness Find You.
She had quit in the chapter named
How to Let Yourself Let Yourself Go“.
[that’s why I’m here, for this kind of nonsense.]
Ch 2 We learn all about Twilly, who is some kind of trust fund baby.
We also learn:
The Proud Boys are anti-wanking!
I did not know this! But the internet says it’s true!
p 20 Our anti-hero Figgo was expelled from the Proud Boys for trashing a monument to a Confederate war hero from Mississippi (whose statue is still in the Capitol for some reason) during the Capitol Riots on January 6!
Figgo thought it was Ulysses Grant!
The displaced resentment from this caused him to wank so hard he got carpal tunnel … or “carpy tunnel” as he says.
A little over the top, but hey, it’s a Hiaasen book!
23 Viva’s perfect South Florida job is the “wealth director” of the Mink Foundation which gives away money so folks will remember Claude and Electra Mink.!
She and the Minks are having dinner with an upstate Florida Congressperson who wants a donation for a foundation he made up to teach underage kids construction. Yes, unbelievably sketchy!
His name is Clure Boyette. His district is upper west part of Florida, but he’s never there. He spends all his time with expensive hookers on the coast.
p 37 Dale has a sidekick, Jonas Onus, which is a lot funnier the second time I read it! 🙂
He is a fire fighter retired early on a bogus insurance claim, and he has three kids from three different women born within days of each other. I’m sure there’s a great story behind that, but the author hasn’t shared it yet.
p 52 The resident that got run over all the way back in Scene 1 is recovering from his injuries and he’s pretty pissed. Not just about his injuries but the anti-semitism and racism of Dale Figgo. His name is Noel, very Scandinavian, the whitest man you’ll ever meet.
p 58 The Highway Patrol person investigation Noel’s hit and run is getting a part in our drana it seems. She is Danielle Dominguez. Watching Dale think he can outsmart her because she’s just a minority hire is painful to witness.
Dale and Onus call a meeting of their group, Strokers for Liberty. :)))
They meet at Fever Beach 🙂
It’s getting complicated…
- Viva works for the Mink Foundation
- The Foundation is devoted to money-laundering.
- Clure Boyette just donated 1-2 million to the Foundation to be laundered.
- He (and Claude Mink) are both right-wing zealots and (surprise!) completely immoral.
- Strokers for Liberty is to be their money laundering vehicle!
- Clure invited Viva for drinks.
- She accepts for her own reasons.
- Clure is much more central to the plot than I anticipated
- Dale’s truck gets repossessed
- He’s getting sued by Noel the Scandinavian he ran over
- Viva and Twilly finally get it on!
- Onus gets greedy. He’s plotting ways to get a chunk of that 2 million.
- Viva and Clure’s underage cutie – Galaxy – get together for drinks.
- (It was ok, Galaxy knew the bartender. 🙂
- Dale calls a meeting at Fever Beach
- Onus loses it and cheap-shots him.
- Noel’s black wive tracks down Dale’s power-boxing mother.
- They make an entertaining cross-alliance to make our complicated story even more complicated!
A lot of silly stuff happens, but the really funny one is that Dale decides to take his crew of misfits to Key West for a “secret” practice mission to get publicity for the group by busting up a gay bar (!!! In Key West !!!)
Twilly, who has easily infiltrated the group, tells Dale repeatedly this is a TERRIBLE idea! Sure enough, the performers and servers at the transsexual bar they invaded (Trauma Queens) were into martial arts and utterly demolished the rednecks.
Back home, things get even more complicated:
- Galaxy blackmails Clure for a $300K Astin-Martin.
- Somehow Twilly spends some of his bottomless pile of money to get it instead, just to keep everybody off balance.
- Galaxy and Viva become friends and have drinks together.
- Clure’s equally racist, anti-semitic and anti-gay dad is in the picture also.
- Every time Clure needs money, which is quite often he has to hit dad up for it.
- Onus is trying to take over the Strokers to get his hands on that 2 million!
p 262 Viva to Twilly … very drool repartee for our heroes.
Wnen you come back, I want to try something super kinky in bed.
What’s that?
Eye contact!
Subplot
This sub plot has been going on for most of the book, but just got interesting here at the end.
The Minks’ biggest scam is a development (the Bunkers) out in a beautiful, pristine part of the Florida Keys that was almost a done deal in when one of the corrupt County Commisioner (Baltry) disappeared with all his bribe money.
As long as he’s just “absent”, the deal cannot be finalized. So the Minks hired a hit man named Moe to kill him and email back proof that h is dead so they can install a new commisioner. Moe found him easily enough hiding in Montana, and sure gave the impression he was going to kill him at the end of a chapter.
Now we find that he did NOT kill him. Apparently Moe the killer is jewish, and got wind of what virulent, raging anti-semites the Minks are, and decided eff-em, he’ll let the guy go..
In another complication, Clure’s dad (Clay) has hired Moe to eliminate Galaxy.
p 316 Oh it’s getting very cute.
- 307 Baltry is loose and somehow talks to Twilly
- He tells Twilly why Moe let him go.
- but Hiaasen’s idea of suspense is to not tell us for a few pages.
- 309 The make and model of Baltry’s car, which Moe took over to “go undercover” comes up and Twilly realizes Galaxy saw it hanging outside her house!!!
Soon enough, Moe is knocking on her door and Galaxy totally handles him.
The killer found himself horse-collared and facedown on a stale pile carpet, immobilized by a girl he outweighted by at least 80 pounds. She smelled like mountain wildflowers, which made the sitation even more surreal. Where the knife came from he didn’t know. He felt the tip of the plade pressed keenly into the side of his neck, the girl’s calm breath in his ear.
Did the congressman send you?
That’s some quality stuff, right??
p 316 With the knife still in his neck they have a very entertaining dialog for four pages ending with Moe inviting her to dinner after he realized she knows the Minks (who hired him for the first hit if you’re losing track).
What other crazy s–t is gonna happen in the last 40 pages?
Denouement
- Twilly and Viva are in her room at Dale’s having fun.
- Onus shows up, intent on beating the eff out of Dale.
- Dale isn’t home, so Onus has the very bad idea to force himself on Viva.
- Honestly, I’m surprised this han’t happened sooner.
- Last thing he remembers is getting clonked on the head.
- He gets some pages of folllow-up, but that’s it for Onus in this story.
- Sadly we don’t hear much about the lunch with Galaxy and her assassin, but it happened
- Baltry, the first victim that wasn’t actually killed, makes a surprise appearance at the next Bunkers meeting to reject the project and turn states evidence against the Minks and the other corrupt commisioners.
- The Wee Hammers house goes up in flames.
The masterstroke that will get the Strokerz(*) national recignition and win the election for Clure is to take over a voting location in his district, a retirement community called Serene Transitions. Since I am typing this from my living room in a retirement community, this is kind of poingnat.
(*) Onus’ big contribution after becoming co-leader of the group was to change Strokers to Strokerz.
You won’t be surprised to learn that the whole operation is a clusterfuck. The police show up in force and assure that voters can vote safely. The Strokerz are scattered and arrested.
Dale escaped the scene but manages to eliminate himself anyway by hanging himseof while climbing up a flagpole to deface a Pride flag.
To wrap it all up, all the good people have good things happen to then and all the bad people have bad things happen.
- Dale’s dead.
- Onus is dead.
- Claude Mink keels over at a board meeting.
- Clure is not a congressman any more.
On the other hand…
Twilly and Viva are getting along great! She thinks she’s gonna take an office job in New York (ugh). Twilly is moving ahead on his island.
