At the stroke of eleven on a cool April night, a woman named Joey Perrone went overboard from a luxury deck of the cruise liner M.V. Sun Duchess....The impact tore off her silk skirt, blouse, panties, wristwatch and sandals, but Joey remained conscious and alert.
Her panties? I can see the impact tearing off her skirt and perhaps blouse, if not all the way, then so much that it would be better to ditch them than try to struggle them back on. But her panties? I can't see that if it were all she were wearing and she went in head first. But of course, if the impact doesn't tear off her panties, then Hiaasen can't have his catchy title.
This points up the difference between a novel being unrealistic and being unbelievable. Nearly all novels are unrealistic to at least some extent. Hiaasen makes a living with unrealistic characters. This book has a marine biologist who doesn't particularly like nature, a police detective with two seven-foot boa constrictors, and a good ole boy who picks up crosses from highway-side memorials because he likes the look of them on his lawn. These are not meant to be people about whom you say, "I know someone like that." But for the most part, Hiaasen makes them believable. You don't think about how unrealistic they are, because you're caught up in the story.
This particular incident, however, struck me as wrong. Perhaps it was because I wasn't caught up in the story, yet. Or perhaps it was because it seemed like such a blatant effort to titillate. It was gratuitous nudity, in the worst sense of the phrase.
Fortunately for Hiaasen (as if he cares), I was too lazy to put the book down and look for something else. So I just kept reading, and I did get caught up in the story. Joey survived, of course, and she is now plotting revenge on her husband, who pushed her. The characters, as I said, are the usual South Florida loony tunes that populate Hiaasen's books, if not the actual South Florida. It's enjoyable, if not deep.
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