Skinny Dip is a caper novel by Carl Hiaasen first published in 2004. Set in southern Florida in the course of April, 2003, it is about a young woman's revenge on her cheating husband after he has tried to murder her. Skinny Dip is also about environmental issues, in particular the protection of the Everglades as a natural habitat for a large variety of animal species. The caper story is a subgenre of crime fiction. ... Photo of Carl Hiaasen by Robert Birnbaum Carl Hiaasen [pronounced hiya-sun] (born March 12, 1953) is an American journalist and novelist. ... See also: 2003 in literature, other events of 2004, 2005 in literature, list of years in literature. ... State nickname: Everglade State, Sunshine State Other U.S. States Capital Tallahassee Largest city Jacksonville Governor Jeb Bush Official languages English Area 170,451 km² (22nd)  - Land 137,374 km²  - Water 30,486 km² (17. ... 2003 : January - February - March - April - May - June - July - August - September - October - November - December _ → A timeline of events in the news for April 2003. ... Environment - Wikipedia /**/ @import /skins/monobook/IE50Fixes. ... An Anhinga perched on the boardwalk railing The Florida Everglades is a subtropical marshland located in the southern portion of the U.S. state of Florida, specifically in parts of Monroe, Collier, Palm Beach, Miami-Dade, and Broward counties. ... The term habitat has a number of unrelated meanings: A concept in Ecology: see habitat. ...

Outline of the plot

Dr Charles Perrone is a young, handsome marine biologist who does not conform to the ideal set forth by the distinguished members of his profession. A hypochondriac who by some means or other made it through college, he is mainly interested in promoting himself and in pursuing what he considers the good life: money, sex, and an otherwise undisturbed, pleasurable existence devoid of any intellectual ambitions let alone the urge to explore and experience the great outdoors. Despite his marriage to a beautiful and rich woman called Joey he continuously has affairs with other women, mainly in order to prove his own sexual stamina. His insatiable greed for more money than he can spend drives him straight into the arms of Samuel Johnson Hammernut, a crooked entrepreneur who owns large vegetable fields adjacent to the Everglades, which he relentlessly pollutes with the various fertilizers he uses on his crops. Officially employed by the state authorities to check on the pollution level of the water in the swamp, Perrone is actually also on Hammernut's payroll for forging the test results and thus helping him save large amounts of money the latter would otherwise have to spend on the erection of purification plants. Perrone's worst days at work are those when he actually has to leave his office and make field trips to the Everglades to take water samples. Marine biology is the study of animal and plant life within saltwater ecosystems. ... Hypochondria (sometimes hypochondriasis) is the unfounded belief that one is suffering from a serious illness. ... Greed is a desire to obtain more money or material possessions or bodily satisfaction than one is considered to need. ... Fertilizers are chemicals given to plants with the intention of promoting growth; they are usually applied either via the soil or by foliar spraying. ... A freshwater swamp A swamp is a wetland that features permanent inundation of large areas of land by shallow bodies of water, generally with a substantial number of hummocks, or dry-land protrusions. ...

One day Joey Perrone returns home unexpectedly while her husband is filling in the doctored figures on a chart. As she has never taken any interest in her husband's work, Joey is happily unaware of what Perrone is doing there. He, however, seized by a sudden fear that she might go ahead and report him, thinks hard about how he could prevent her from doing so. Eventually, Perrone sees no other way out of his imagined predicament than to kill his wife. Consequently, he begins to meticulously plan the perfect murder. The perfect murder is a murder which benefits the murderer, but also has no negative consequences for the murderer; usually, this simply means that the murderer is never caught. ...

On their second wedding anniversary he invites his wife on a cruise and one night, while they are out at sea, throws her overboard. Having been an excellent swimmer all her life, Joey Perrone survives the attempt on her life despite the enormous height from which she has been pushed and, after clinging to a floating bale of marijuana for several hours, is picked up early the next morning. Her rescuer is Mick Stranahan, a former investigator now in his early fifties who a long time ago was forced into early retirement by the State Attorney. Stranahan takes her to a small island in Biscayne Bay off the Floridian coast owned by a successful but ageing Mexican novelist. Stranahan, who has been married six times, is now in the novelist's pay, leading a solitary life guarding the island and "making up for all the years of foolish companionship". Having cut down his trips to the mainland to an absolute minimum, he has hardly any contact with the rest of the world except by means of an unreliable mobile phone. His only companion is an inefficient doberman called Strom. After Joey Perrone has fully recovered, it is from there that they plan her secret revenge together. Married persons who regard their marriage as important may mark the anniversary of their wedding in some special way. ... Cruise may refer to Cruise, a distinct stage of an aircrafts flight Cruising, living on the boat and traveling for extended periods of time Tom Cruise, an American film actor and producer Cruise missile, a guided missile e. ... Cannabis is a plant also known as Cannabis sativa, hemp, or marijuana. ... Retirement is the status of a worker who has stopped working. ... The States Attorney is an appointed or elected office of various, but not all, counties in the United States. ... Dont confuse it with the European Bay of Biscay. ... Country of origin Germany Common nicknames Dobie Classification Breed standards (external links) FCI, AKC, ANKC, CKC KC(UK), NZKC, UKC The Dobermann or Doberman Pinscher (also, more colloquially, Dobie) is a breed of domestic dog. ... Strom Thurmond James Strom Thurmond (December 5, 1902 – June 26, 2003), known as Strom Thurmond, was the oldest and longest serving United States Senator, who represented South Carolina from 1954 to April 1956 and November 1956 to 1964 as a Democrat and from 1964 to 2003 as a Republican. ... Revenge is retaliation against a person or group in response to wrongdoing. ...

After a few days the search for Joey Perrone by boat and helicopter is stopped, and she is presumed to have drowned in the ocean. Charles Perrone plays the grieving husband, making use of all the scripts he has thought up and memorized while planning the murder. As no witnesses come forward, any suspicion that Perrone might himself be involved in his wife's disappearance remains unsubstantiated, and the police come to believe that the missing person has either had an accident—Perrone having testified that she had had quite a lot to drink that night—or that she committed suicide. However, no motive whatsoever can be found supporting the latter assumption. For the same lack of motive, murder by someone other than her husband is more or less ruled out. A helicopter is an aircraft which is lifted and propelled by one or more large horizontal rotors (propellers). ... Alternate meanings: Accident (fallacy), Accident (philosophy), Accident (movie), Accident, Maryland An accident is something going wrong. ... Suicide (from Latin sui caedere, to kill oneself) is the act of intentionally ending ones own life. ... For other meanings of motive see motive (algebraic geometry) and (alternate spelling of) motif (music). ...

Joey Perrone urges Stranahan, who complies, not to inform the police about the fact that she is still alive. Rather, she wants to drive her husband to insanity by building on his vanity and his innate tendency towards paranoia. They start with little things such as entering the Perrones' house while Charles is at work and putting objects in unlikely places. For example, Joey punctures one of the tyres of Perrone's car with one of his steak knives, which she leaves sticking in the tyre. Also, she cuts out her face from a photo showing herself and her husband as a couple and places the mutilated image under his pillow. One day, he returns at an unexpected time of day with one of his girlfriends in tow and Joey, hiding under their bed, unwittingly becomes a witness to Perrone for the first time in his life being unable to get an erection, an experience which leaves him greatly flustered. Vanity is similar to pride, but it involves an excessive admiration of oneself because of ones real or imaginary skills, talents, accomplishments, or appearance. ... In popular culture, the term paranoia is usually used to describe excessive concern about ones own well-being, sometimes suggesting a person holds persecutory beliefs concerning a threat to themselves or their property and is often linked to a belief in conspiracy theories. ... Tyre (native Phoenician Ṣur, Latin Tyrus, Akkadian Ṣurru, Tiberian Hebrew צר Ṣōr, Greek Τύρος Týros, Arabic الصور aṣ-Ṣūr) is an ancient Phoenician city in Lebanon on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea, about 23 miles, in a direct line, north of Acre, and 20 south of Sidon. ... An uncircumcised penis in both flaccid and fully erect states. ...

Joey and Stranahan soon fall in love with each other and continue to plan more intricate and sophisticated acts of revenge. In particular, they want to blackmail Charles Perrone by inventing another passenger or a crew member who claims he has seen him push his wife overboard. Perrone becomes increasingly worried because the blackmailer, who has already called him on the phone imitating Charleton Heston's voice, is able to describe the crime in minute detail. Perrone eventually concludes that only the police detective in charge of the case, Karl Rolvaag, could know so much about it. When he confronts Rolvaag with his ideas about the blackmailer's identity ("Can we please cut all this ridiculous bullshit? Just tell me how much you want.") the baffled detective gathers that Perrone is really much more involved in his wife's disappearance than he would make everyone believe. For other uses, see Blackmail (disambiguation). ... The artists rendering of a bare_headed Charlton Heston as Moses was bulked up to modern physique standards when the DVD was released Charlton Heston (born October 4, American film actor noted for heroic roles. ...

As Perrone is driving an expensive SUV paid for with one of Hammernut's credit cards, the police are soon able to establish a link between Perrone and the shady businessman. Reacting to all the unfavourable incidents happening around him, Hammernut ("The shit hits the fan, I'll deny everything") orders one of his employees, an illiterate, heavy-set and hairy man called Earl Edward O'Toole, to act as Perrone's bodyguard: at first to shield him from possible attacks by the blackmailer, but later to prevent him from exposing, either deliberately or accidentally, Hammernut's abominable crimes against nature. "Tool", as O'Toole is called by everybody, has been addicted to pain killers ever since he was hit by a bullet which he has never had surgically removed from his body. Now he becomes Perrone's constant companion, always watchful unless he has just had a fresh dose of fentanyl, which always makes him drowsy. A sport utility vehicle (SUV) or off-roader is a vehicle that combines the load-hauling and passenger-carrying capacity of a large station wagon or minivan with features designed for off-road driving. ... Missing image Credit cards A credit card system is a type of retail transaction settlement and credit system, named after the small plastic card issued to users of the system. ... Literacy is the ability to use text to communicate across space and time. ... A bodyguard is a person who protects someone from personal assault, kidnapping, assassination, loss of confidential information, or other threats. ... Addictive redirects here. ... For other uses of painkiller, see painkiller (disambiguation) An analgesic (colloquially known as painkiller) is any member of the diverse group of drugs used to relieve pain. ... Fentanyl is an opioid analgesic, first synthesized in Belgium in the late 1950s, with an analgesic potency of about 80 times that of morphine. ...

The biologist's judgement deteriorates with every day, and so he erroneously believes one of his sex partners, a hair stylist called Ricca Spillman, to be the blackmailer's girlfriend and accomplice. At gunpoint Perrone makes her drive to the swamp at Loxahatchee where, in the dark, he fires away at her. Ricca plunges into the water and seemingly drowns. However, unknown to Perrone, she survives and is rescued by a mentally challenged Vietnam veteran who now considers the Everglades his home. At law, an accomplice is a person who actively participates in the commission of a crime, even though they take no part in the actual criminal offence. ... A veteran refers to a person who is experienced in a particular area, particularly referring to people in the armed forces. ...

Meanwhile, an ever growing circle of friends and relatives are let in on the true state of affairs and play along with Stranahan and Joey Perrone. For example, Joey's sexy friend from the book club, Rose Jewell, approaches Perrone after the memorial service and offers to console him during supper at her place. Expecting an easy lay where he can once again show off his sexual prowess, Perrone greedily accepts the invitation, only to be drugged by Rose and put to sleep in her bed. Only half awake, he thinks he is hallucinating when he finds his "dead" wife sitting at his side asking him reproachfully why he has tried to murder her. On the following morning he wakes up from his drug-induced slumber sitting stark naked at the wheel of his car, which has been parked on the shoulder of a busy road during rush hour. Later he is even sent a video allegedly recorded on the night of the murder showing his crime, a film in which he clearly recognizes his wife while he can see himself only from behind. But the police have not quite closed the case either, and Rolvaag is intrigued to learn that a mysterious customer—in fact Joey herself—has used the victim's credit card to buy women's clothes and accessories in several shopping malls in the area. A hallucination is a false sensory perception in the absence of an external stimulus, as distinct from an illusion, which is a misperception of an external stimulus. ... Other meanings: Movie starring Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker, expansion pack to SimCity 4, shuffling puzzle by ThinkFun, album. ... Video is the technology of processing electronic signals representing moving pictures. ... Accessory is a German EBM group consisting of Dirk Steyer and Ivo Lottig. ... For the traditional meaning of the word mall, see mall. ...

The final showdown takes place at night out in the open sea during a heavy thunderstorm. Following the blackmailer's instructions, Perrone rents a small boat with an outboard motor and, together with Tool, drives to a former community of wooden houses built on pilings that was eradicated by Hurricane Andrew. This is the spot where he is supposed to hand over a suitcase containing $ 500,000. Hammernut, who has provided the money, has instructed Tool to kill Perrone well before the encounter with the blackmailer and return the suitcase to him, but Tool has other plans: He wants to abandon his life of crime, reform, and become a respectable citizen. However, even before the blackmailers can establish contact with Perrone the biologist shoots Tool, who falls into the water but, again unknown to Perrone, is rescued by Stranahan and his friends. Perrone can make his escape, safely arrives at the mainland with the money and immediately drives home. His new plan is to compose a suicide note ("Tonight I shall reunite with my beloved"), disappear and start a new life in Costa Rica. But before he can leave he is caught by Hammernut and Tool, hog-tied, and driven to the Everglades. A rolling thundercloud over Enschede, The Netherlands. ... Hurricane Andrew approaching the Bahamas and Florida This article is about the 1992 hurricane; there was also a Tropical Storm Andrew during the 1986 Atlantic hurricane season. ... A suicide note is a message left by someone who later attempts or commits suicide. ...

When Hammernut orders Tool to shoot Perrone, the thug deliberately misses and the biologist can escape into the swamp, where in time he is picked up by the deranged Vietnam veteran, who knows all about him through his encounter with Ricca Spillman and who tells him he has not decided yet what to do with him. On the way home to Hammernut's farm the entrepreneur insults Tool, who takes revenge on his boss in the middle of nowhere by slaying him and impaling his body on one of the numerous roadside crosses commemorating a fatal car accident. A cross is a geometrical figure consisting of two lines or bars intersecting each other at a 90° angle, dividing one or two of the lines in half. ...

While Joey Perrone decides to stay with Stranahan on his lonely island and Rolvaag finally closes the case and moves back to his native Minnesota, Tool is left with all the money. He decides to spend the first part of it on a vet who removes two bullets from his body, and on a new, comfortable pickup truck in which he embarks on a trip to Canada. He does not travel alone though but together with Maureen, his 81 year-old substitute mother who is dying of cancer and who, during her stay at a hospice, has been his regular source of the fentanyl patches he needed so urgently. State nickname: North Star State Other U.S. States Capital Saint Paul Largest city Minneapolis Governor Tim Pawlenty Official languages None Area 225,365 km² (12th)  - Land 206,375 km²  - Water 18,990 km² (8. ... In American and Canadian English, a veterinarian (from Latin veterinae, draught animals) is an animal doctor, a practitioner of veterinary medicine. ... Pickup truck with extended cabin and homebuilt lumber rack. ... When normal cells are damaged or old they undergo apoptosis; cancer cells, however, avoid apoptosis. ... Palliative care is any form of medical care or treatment that concentrates on reducing the severity of the symptoms of a disease or slows its progress rather than providing a cure. ...

Title

A skinny-dipper is someone who swims in the nude, thus showing all their skin. Skinny Dip refers to the fact that when Joey Perrone is thrown overboard the impact when hitting the surface of the water tears off all her clothes so that on the following morning her rescuer finds her not only completely exhausted but also stark naked. Also, throughout the novel people find themselves in embarrassing situations due to their—occasionally inexplicable—nakedness.

Discussion

In bookshops, Hiaasen's novels can still be found on the shelves labelled "Crime Fiction" (often classified as "environmental thrillers") although they can also be read as satirical and comic mainstream novels depicting people in difficult and outrageous situations triggered by human weaknesses such as greed, lust, ignorance, or revenge. Skinny Dip is a tongue-in-cheek narrative which gains a lot of momentum through its subplots, be it Tool's gradual reformation through his touching visits to a dying geriatric too proud to admit that she has been abandoned by her family, Karl Rolvaag's search for his escaped pet pythons, or Perrone's erectile dysfunction, which he wants to cure with the help of Viagra-type "blue pills", a medication "the FDA definitely would not approve". Satire is a literary technique of writing or art which principally ridicules its subject (individuals, organizations, states) often as an intended means of provoking or preventing change. ... Mainstream is a term most often applied in the arts—i. ... Greed is a desire to obtain more money or material possessions or bodily satisfaction than one is considered to need. ... The word lust means sexual desire (this meaning is sometimes metaphorically extended to other forms of desire, e. ... Ignorance is a lack of knowledge, or a willful lack of desire to improve the efficiency, merit, effectiveness or usefulness of ones actions. ... A subplot is a series of connected actions within a work of narrative that function separately from the main plot. ... For other meanings, see Python (disambiguation). ... Impotence or, more clinically, erectile dysfunction is the inability to maintain an erection of the penis for satisfactory sexual intercourse regardless of the capability of ejaculation. ... Sildenafil citrate, sold under the name Viagra, is a drug used to treat male erectile dysfunction (impotence), developed by the pharmaceutical company Pfizer. ... The United States Food and Drug Administration is the government agency responsible for regulating food, dietary supplements, drugs, cosmetics, medical devices, biologics and blood products in the United States. ...

Just like other novels by Hiaasen, Skinny Dip features characters who have been beaten by society and who have made the great outdoors their permanent home. While Mick Stranahan has been able to keep his wits about him, the lone Vietnam veteran Ricca and Perrone meet on separate occasions in the wilderness has seemingly lost the game against his overwhelming adversaries. However, we are pointed to the fact that, as opposed to the latter, he lives a sustainable life absolutely in tune with nature, without depleting any natural resources or polluting the environment. Sustainability is an economic, social, and environmental concept. ...

Several reviewers have remarked on the farcical quality of Skinny Dip. True, in the novel there are a number of situations reminiscent of the classical farces of the 19th and 20th centuries. For instance, at one point, five people are in the Perrones' house, with each of them reluctant to disclose their presence to any of the others: Tool in his capacity as bodyguard trying to protect Perrone while at the same time groggy after having been attacked by a stranger; Stranahan spying around the house; Perrone and a woman called Medea in bed together unsuccessfully trying to make love; and Joey under the bed, desperately trying not to draw attention to her own person. In a similar vein, Perrone, drunk and drugged and groping around under the bed cover, thinks it is Rose who is lying beside him while in fact it is his lawful wedded wife. Definition A farce is a comedy written for the stage, or a film, which aims to entertain the audience by means of unlikely and extravagant yet often possible situations, disguise and mistaken identity, verbal humour of varying degrees of sophistication, which may include puns and sexual innuendo, and a fast... Alternative meaning: Nineteenth Century (periodical) (18th century — 19th century — 20th century — more centuries) As a means of recording the passage of time, the 19th century was that century which lasted from 1801-1900 in the sense of the Gregorian calendar. ... (19th century - 20th century - 21st century - more centuries) Decades: 1900s 1910s 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s As a means of recording the passage of time, the 20th century was that century which lasted from 1901–2000 in the sense of the Gregorian calendar (1900–1999 in the...

Other farcical situations concern Perrone's paranoia insofar as he does not only imagine that people are conspiring against him. All the strange things he tries to rationalize, for example by resorting to his hypochondria—thus he thinks his hallucinations are due to his having been infected by the West Nile virus—,are in fact parts of a sophisticated hoax aimed at his eventual downfall rather than mere figments of his imagination. In psychology, rationalization is the process of constructing a logical justification for a decision that was originally arrived at through a different mental process. ... West Nile virus is a newly emergent virus of the family Flaviviridae, found in both tropical and temperate regions. ...

Also, Perrone's inability to kill another person make for a number of funny situations. In the course of the action he attempts to kill three different people, but in the end each of them resurfaces and takes part in the revenge plot against him. Finally, there is the suitcase full of money which changes hands ever so often until in the end the least likely person in the game is rewarded with it.

Read on

• In his other novels, most notably Tourist Season and Sick Puppy, Hiaasen also deals with the systematic destruction of the environment in his native Florida.
• What Hiaasen does for Florida, Edward Abbey did for the American West.
• In his novels T. C. Boyle also frequently deplores the depletion of natural resources and the changing face of our surroundings, most notably in The Tortilla Curtain and his horrifying vision of the future of America, A Friend of the Earth.
• Dave Barry's 1999 novel Big Trouble shows a similar kind of subject-matter, style and humour.
• Charles Willeford's later crime fiction is also set in Florida. A novel depicting a group of young men who turn to crime in search of the good life is The Shark-Infested Custard, written in the mid-1970s and first published in 1993.
• In a few noteworthy cases, classic British crime fiction of the 1930s also saw the abandonment of the whodunnit in favour of the psychological suspense novel, which right from the start of the narrative follows the perpetrator's thoughts and motives. Examples include Frances Iles (Malice Aforethought, Before the Fact, the latter filmed by Hitchcock as Suspicion) and Freeman Wills Crofts (The 12.30 from Croydon).
• Finally, in Roald Dahl's short story "Dip in the Pool", a man goes overboard a cruise liner without anyone who might want to help him noticing.