“What is Florida anyway?” the columnist-turned-revolutionary Skip Wiley asks in Tourist Season, the first of Carl Hiaasen’s bestselling crime capers set in the Sunshine State. “An immense sunny toilet where millions of tourists flush their money and save the moment on Kodak film.” Skip Wiley is, ostensibly, the villain of Tourist Season, pitted against his former co-worker Brian Keyes, a good-looking ex-reporter who’s trying to make it in the PI business.
After all, it’s Wiley who wants to scare every last tourist and retiree out of Florida—at least those he doesn’t personally feed to a 17-foot crocodile named Pavlov—and Keyes who tries to stop him.

Yet Skip Wiley is indisputably the star of Tourist Season. His manifestos make the front page of the paper; he’s always a step ahead of Keyes; his long speeches about Florida’s grimy history are delivered to us, uncut, by a columnist turned novelist who clearly agrees with every word he says, if not his propensity for homicide. Tourist Season was published in 1986, when Hiaasen himself had just moved from reporting at the Miami Herald to the columnist’s seat he would occupy for 35 years. “I knew I wanted to write something funny that still sort of cut to the ugly part of the bone marrow,” the novelist—whose new book Fever Beach is out May 13—has said. He couldn’t stand that, as a journalist, he could write about what was happening to his beloved Florida but he couldn’t do anything about it. “I don’t care how dispassionate you are as a reporter,” he said. “It’s hard not to get pissed off. The books were great therapy for that.”

Nearly 40 years and 20-plus books later, what was happening to Florida is now happening to the entire country. The United States is being despoiled, corrupted, perverted, bulldozed into a playground for the wealthy. The archetype Hiaasen helped invent, the Florida Man, was once just an overconfident moron who, say, drowned while wrestling a gator for his beer. Now America is run by Florida Men.

No satirist arrived at our dystopian moment better prepared than Carl Hiaasen. The bad guys in Hiaasen’s books have always been dangerous and mockable. These days they’re more dangerous than ever, and an infuriated Hiaasen mocks them just as viciously as they deserve—punishes them in ways that, thus far, the real world has been unable to do. At age 72, unexpectedly more relevant than he’s ever been, Carl Hiaasen is on a hot streak that rivals his early career. Fever Beach is among Hiaasen’s best novels, because it faces the horrors of our stupid times and portrays them in all their grotesquerie.