If you live in Florida and haven't read Carl Hiaasen's novels, you're doing yourself a disservice. His depictions of the madness that permeates life in our drained swamp is both darkly humorous and depressingly realistic.

Nature Girl is the most recent in the series beginning with 1986's Tourist Season. However, unlike the norm for mysteries, the only consistent continuing character from one novel to the next is the state itself.

Now that I think about it, Florida may be the strangest and funniest character ever seen in fiction.

Anyway, this isn't Hiaasen's best novel — I still prefer Stormy Weather, and have a soft spot for the aforementioned Tourist Season — but the tale of a philandering telemarketer, a bipolar mother, a blue-eyed Seminole in atonement, and the way their lives intersect is still a lot of fun.

(Want to read an excerpt? Here you go.)