Book Review: Lucky You

by Carl Hiaasen

Fiction, 1997, 353 p.

ISBN: 0-679-45444-6

Carl Hiaasen, Florida native, novelist and occasional columnist for the Miami Herald, is back in action with the new novel Lucky You. In his latest offering, the author of Native Tongue and Tourist Season manages to take shots at tourist scams, gun-toting rednecks, real estate developers, newspaper editors and undivorceable wives. The main characters in this new offering are a veterinary assistant named JoLayne Lucks; Tom Krome, a reporter for a Florida daily paper; two viciously stupid rednecks; a kidnapped Hooters waitress; and a host of misfits and entrepreneurs from all over Florida.

When JoLayne Lucks wins half the Florida State Lottery's $28 million prize, she knows exactly what she is going to do with the money. She plans to save a 44 acre plot of land in her hometown of Grange, Florida, from imminent development. She had been visiting the lot for years, sitting by the creek and watching the baby turtles swim, and she does not want to see it bulldozed and paved for a strip center by the out of state development company currently planning to buy the land.

Unfortunately for JoLayne, the other winning ticket in the big drawing is held by two dangerously inept criminals.

"Bode Gazzer was five feet six and had never forgiven his parents for it." He spent his time poaching from lobster traps off the Florida coast and planning his own underground militia to repel the NATO troops when they invade from the Bahamas.

Bode met his only friend Chub when he came to Chub's apartment to buy a counterfeit handicapped parking sticker, so that he could park closer to the door on his frequent visits to the Parole office. Chub, born Onus Dean Gillespie, had "by age fifteen already chosen a life of sloth, inebriation and illiteracy," despite a fairly good upbringing. Bode recruits Chub for his budding militia, and begins educating him on the coming NATO invasion. When the two find themselves in possession of one of the winning tickets for the $28 million lottery drawing,

Bode suggests that they just go get the other one, too. As he sees it, they'll need all the money they can get to successfully outfit their militia, and the lottery is probably rigged, anyway.

Tom Krome is an investigative reporter, forced by unfortunate circumstances to write for the Features section of a mid-sized Florida newspaper. He is sent to Grange to write a story about Ms. Lucks' good fortune in the lottery.

The small town of Grange, Florida, is famous only among religious pilgrims from up north, who flock to the town to see, among other things, a stain in the highway that resembles Jesus Christ, and Dominick Amador's self-inflicted stigmata. Out of work and desperate, Mr. Amador made himself a tourist attraction with an electric drill, and now goes to great lengths to "keep the wounds fresh." The biggest attraction in Grange is the weeping Madonna, whose tears are scented with Charly perfume. As the proprietor of the shrine explains: "this was supposed to be Jesus' mother, for heaven's sake. Her tears ought to smell special."

When Tom stops by JoLayne's house for a second interview, he finds that she has been viciously beaten and robbed of the winning lottery ticket. Knowing that she has to have possession of the winning ticket to collect the lottery prize, and trying to beat the developers to the 44 acres she wants to save, JoLayne and Tom take off after the criminals to try and recover her stolen lottery ticket.

They are aided in their search by the criminals themselves, who keep using JoLayne's credit card as they travel south. Bode and Chub stock up on guns and ammunition at a gun show, then spend several consecutive evenings at the same Hooter's restaurant. They keep returning because Chub has fallen in love with their waitress, Amber. When Amber doesn't return Chub's affections, even after he sets her boyfriend's car on fire, Chub decides to have her kidnapped.

What follows is a riotous chase through south Florida. Tom and JoLayne track the hapless militiamen, along with a new recruit from a convenience store and the kidnapped Hooters girl, to an uninhabited island in the Florida Keys. Once there, a tragically funny climax unfolds.

If you've read any of Carl Hiaasen's other novels, you'll quickly recognize some of the themes in his latest offering (although Skink does not appear). Hiaasen has always been opposed to the developers who drastically changed the landscape of south Florida in the latter half of this century, and he gives them their comeuppance once again in Lucky You. He also has a habit of sadistically torturing the inept criminals who populate his novels. Chub is the elected torturee in this novel, and by the end he is so comically persecuted by forces of nature and homebrew medical care that you almost feel sorry for him.

Despite the familiar themes, this is one of Hiaasen's funniest novels yet. From the hilarious militia-redneck dialogues over wings and beer at a south Florida Hooters restaurant to the sarcastic take on the religious tourist traps in Grange, this book is laugh-out-loud funny.