About the Author

Carl Hiaasen (pronounced "hiya-sun") was born and raised in South Florida and presently lives in Tavernier, smack in the middle of the Florida Keys. He attended Emory University and was graduated with a degree in journalism from the University of Florida at Gainesville in 1974.

Hiaasen began his journalism career writing weird public interest stories ("Garbageman for a Day") at Cocoa Today (now the Melbourne-based Florida Today). He joined The Miami Herald in 1976, and since then has been a reporter for their general assignment desk, Sunday magazine and investigative team. As part of The Miami Herald's investigative team, Hiaasen has worked on projects exposing dangerous doctors in Florida, land corruption in the Florida Keys, and drug smuggling in the Bahamas and Key West. He is currently Metro columnist for the paper, where his award-winning columns on rapacious development, egregious business practices, and corrupt politicians have helped clarify issues for the Florida citizenry.

Carl Hiaasen turned his hand to fiction in the early eighties. His first novel, Tourist Season, was published in 1986 and named "one of the ten best destination reads of all time" by GQ Magazine. Louise Bernikow, writing in Cosmopolitan, calls Hiaasen's fiction "unbelievably funny -- tears-running-down-your-cheeks funny in spite of some pretty weighty themes like the destruction of the environment and the cutthroat ways of developers." Tony Hillerman calls Hiaasen "the Mark Twain of the crime novel." And Donald Westlake says "Hiaasen is so good he ought to be illegal."

Carl Hiaasen is the author of seven other best-selling novels -- Double Whammy, Skin Tight, Native Tongue, Strip Tease, Stormy Weather and Lucky You -- as well the author of Team Rodent, a revealing essay on the Disney enterprise in Florida. Just recently, a selection of Hiaasen's columns, entitled Kick Ass, was published by University Press of Florida.

Hiaasen is also a songwriter, having co-wrote two songs, "Seminole Bingo" and "Rottweiler Blues", on Warren Zevon's album Mutineer.

Read an interview with Carl Hiaasen.