You know just where you are with Carl Hiassen. A cast of likeable eccentrics. A sunny setting. A hero with high standards and an improbable mission statement. A reptile.
This time round he eschews his usual environmental issues and focuses on a sidelined investigative reporter who decides to dig into the death of a faded rock star and what his Courtney Love-esque widow had to do with it. You either find Hiassen samey, or you relish the familiarity. Put me in camp two, skipper.
George P. breaks the rules - all this "Show, don't tell" nonsense is just that as far as he is concerned. If it saves time to tell you, that's what he does. he's like that. Direct. To the point. That's how he got to write for "The Wire".
Two ex-cons find a bag full of money. But they are trying to go straight, so they put it back. Someone else takes it. The owner wants it back. Will it all end badly?
No doubt.
Read it.
OK, no more than once a year. I promise. Really. Once upon a time I could read two or three Yates's, one after the other. I felt more than a tad icky at the end of it, but I could do it, like eating six Mr Kipling Mince Pies in a single sitting. It's fun, but it ain't good for you. All that flowery prose and high romance and inter-war tacet racism. But still - the heroes are real heroes, the villains are real villains, and the fairyland chateaux set high in the Pyrenees are ... well, perhaps a bit too idealised for reality.
"Shoal Water" is one of Yates's side-shoot thrillers featuring a guest appearance by Jonah Mansel, but without the stiff-upper-chin of Richard Chandos to take the blame for everything that goes wrong. Usual palaver - ex-Uni type, bored with working in the City, buys a sports tourer and heads off to Europe for a few months holidays, meets a gorgeous gal in trouble, falls instantly in love, biffs a few baddies, condemns a few more to death...
Yates is one of the great Clubland Hero writers, and a lot of his novels would make great action movies (I have only ever seen one, and that was a pretty crummy BBC TV version), if they were just a tiny bit more plausible, and even slightly updateable. And that's it - no more for me this year... only, it must be a couple of years since I last read "She Fell Among Thieves", musn't it?
