Skinny Dip

Plot introduction

Set in South Florida in the course of April 2003, it is about a woman, Joey Perrone, who takes revenge on her cheating husband after he has tried to murder her. It is also one of Hiaasen's more topical novels, since the plot also revolves around the ongoing restoration of the Everglades to a natural habitat.

Explanation of the novel's 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.

Plot summary

Charles Regis "Chaz" Perrone is a young marine biologist who has devoted his life solely to the lazy pursuit of a hedonistic existence. His insatiable greed drives him to collude with Samuel Johnson "Red" Hammernut, a crooked farm tycoon who owns large vegetable fields north of the Florida Everglades, which he relentlessly pollutes with fertilizer run-off. Officially employed by the state authorities to test swamp water for pollutants, Chaz is secretly on Red's payroll, forging the test results and allowing Red to avoid facing any regulatory measures.

One day, Chaz's wife Joey returns home unexpectedly while he is filling in the doctored figures on a chart. As she has never taken any interest in his work, Joey has no idea what Chaz is doing. However, Chaz is so paranoid that he suddenly fears that she might report him and begins to meticulously plan a way to kill her. For their second wedding anniversary, Chaz invites Joey on a cruise and throws her overboard while they are out to sea. Being an experienced swimmer, Joey survives by managing to turn her fall into a dive and swims toward the coast. As her strength gives out, she clings to a floating bale of marijuana for several hours.

The next morning, Joey is rescued by Mick Stranahan, a former investigator with the State Attorney who was forced into early retirement. Mick lives on a small island in Biscayne Bay owned by a successful but aging Mexican novelist. Mick is now in the novelist's pay as a caretaker, leading a solitary life guarding the island. When Joey is presumed dead back on the mainland, Chaz pretends to be a grieving husband. As no witnesses come forward, the authorities accept his suggestion that Joey either had an accident or committed suicide. Karl Rolvaag, a Broward County detective investigating the disappearance, is suspicious of Chaz's mannerisms but can find no motive supporting a suspicion of murder.

Joey is equally baffled and begs Mick not to report that she is still alive. Since she has no idea yet why Chaz tried to kill her, she doubts that she can convince the police that it was anything besides attempted murder. Instead, she decides to drive her husband to confess by exploiting his vanity and paranoia; Mick agrees with the plan. Joey starts by entering their house while Chaz is at work and leaving traces of herself – negligees and a photo of the couple with her face cut out. Chaz is unsettled enough by these clues that he experiences erectile dysfunction, leaving him greatly flustered. Joey happens to be hiding under the bed when Chaz returns unexpectedly with one of his girlfriends and fails to have sex with her.

Discussion

Hiaasen's novels are often classified as "Crime Fiction" (or "environmental thrillers"), but 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.

Plot

In his review of Strip Tease, Donald E. Westlake commented that, at the center of all the wackiness was an accessible, touching storyline: a single mother's quest to rescue her young daughter from a reckless husband and an inadequate foster care system. Skinny Dip has at its center a wife who survives a murder attempt by her husband, and is driven not just by the need to get even, but to find out the reason he did it. This gives the novel more focus than some of Hiaasen's other books, which often involve the characters running across each other in random ways, or going on unplanned wanderings across Florida.

The other central plot is the fight to save the Everglades, and the role that the villains are playing in its destruction. Somewhere along the way, the two plot lines converge, and the quest to take revenge on Chaz becomes tied up with the aim of stopping Red's pollution.

In other words, the reader is offered a choice of which thing to root for: some readers may think that Chaz's betrayal of the environment for money makes him detestable, but trying to murder his wife is what makes him a true monster; other readers may think the exact opposite.

Skinny Dip is also enriched by a variety of subplots: Tool's gradual moral awakening, as he grows closer to a dying old lady who is too proud to admit that she has been abandoned by her family; Karl Rolvaag's longing for his native Minnesota, and his search for his escaped pet pythons; Chaz's obsession with sex and his desperate attempts to reverse the erectile dysfunction which is his only sign of guilt over Joey's murder, including experimenting with a black-market version of Viagra – "the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) definitely would not approve."; and finally, the suitcase full of money, which changes hands until it falls into the grip of the least likely person in the story.

The novel contains many scenes reminiscent of classic farces. For instance, at one point there are five people in the Perrone house, three of whom are trying to hide their presence from the other: at the center is Chaz and his "back-up" girlfriend Medea, with whom he has just unsuccessfully attempted sexual relations; hiding under the bed is Joey, caught in the middle of another infiltration of the house; Tool is in another part of the house, ordered to protect Perrone but ordered by him to stay out of the way of his date; and finally Mick, who enters in search of Joey and, when he encounters Tool, politely asks him if he's going to try to stop Mick. ("What a dumb-ass question. Of course I am.")

Accuracy of environmental reporting

In his review of Skinny Dip for The New Republic, Washington Post reporter Michael Grunwald criticized the book as being too fictionalized, and potentially misleading, in describing the causes of the Everglades' ecological status. In Hiaasen's scenario, the Everglades are dying as a result of agricultural contaminants dumped by greedy corporate villains, aided and abetted by corrupt or complacent officials.

Grunwald maintains that the state effort to curtail agricultural pollution is separate from the Everglades Restoration Project, and had been largely successful even before the Project commenced in 2000. Instead, the biggest threat to the Everglades comes not from corporate pollution or corrupt officials, but rather from "John Q. Public" – the diversion of freshwater for South Florida's huge municipalities, and the normal waste products associated with such cities. Grunwald says that when conservation efforts should focus on curtailing the effects of public activity, it is misleading and dangerous to lay all the blame on "bad guys" personified by Red Hammernut and Chaz.

On the other hand, Grunwald agrees that it is "smart to be cynical" about Florida politics, "especially all the daily blathering about conserving our precious natural resources." A recurring theme in Grunwald's book, The Swamp, is that for the majority of Florida's history, the Everglades has been viewed as a hostile territory, a nuisance, or an obstacle to growth, and only very recently has perception changed to regard it as a place worth saving.

Hiaasen is also scathing about this in the chapter when he briefly summarizes the history of the Everglades, and how ninety percent of it has been destroyed through the course of South Florida's development:

Inevitably, the Everglades and all its resplendent wildlife began to die, but no one with the power to prevent it even considered trying. It was, after all, just a huge damn swamp.

But later, it became clear that the Everglades' health was linked to South Florida's drinking water, and if the Everglades died, then growth would stop dead:

Continuity

Mick Stranahan is the protagonist of Hiaasen's third novel Skin Tight.

Other characters from Skin Tight also make brief appearances, including Mick's brother-in-law, crooked lawyer Kipper Garth, and Marine Patrol Officer Luis Cordova.

Skinny Dip makes an oblique reference to Christina Marks, the female protagonist of Skin Tight, in confirming that Christina married Mick, and later divorced him.

The hermit who rescues Ricca is "Skink" aka Clinton Tyree, a recurring character in Hiaasen's novels. The unnamed "intense young man" accompanying him is most likely Twilly Spree, the protagonist of Sick Puppy.

In Hiaasen's book Stormy Weather, Skink takes another character to a stilt house in Biscayne Bay, saying that it used to be occupied by a former Investigator for the State Attorney's Office, who had "recently married a beautiful twelve-string guitarist and moved to the Island of Exuma." Assuming this is a reference to Mick, this is a slight discontinuity with Skinny Dip, in which he lists his number of ex-wives as six: the five mentioned in Skin Tight, plus Christina.

Hiaasen's novels often feature a recurring joke that radiology is a "soft" medical discipline, and those that practice it are not "real" doctors. In this novel, Chaz's backstory explains that his original ambition was to go to medical school and become a radiologist, which struck him as an appealing way to become wealthy without "interacting with actual sick people," and leave him plenty of leisure time to maintain his sex life.

In the book's opening chapter, Joey is disappointed to see that the cruise line's "private island" has been minimally altered since being acquired from its previous owner, a drug smuggler. In his non-fiction book Team Rodent: How Disney Devours the World, Hiaasen pointed out that Disney Cruise Line's inaugural trip plan featured a stop at "Castaway Cay", formerly Gorda Kay, the site of an illicit airstrip used for drug trafficking to South Florida.

Adaptations

Audiobook

An audiobook version of Skinny Dip was released in 2004 by Books on Tape. The audiobook, read by Stephen Hoye, is unabridged and runs 13 hours and 30 minutes over 11 CDs. It was also released in an abridged version, read by Barry Bostwick, running 4 hours and 47 minutes.

Film and television

On July 5, 2011, The Hollywood Reporter reported that HBO Networks was developing Skinny Dip for a film or miniseries.

On February 28, 2018, Deadline reported that The CW was creating a Skinny Dip television series. The pilot episode, written by Russel Friend and Garrett Lerner, and directed by Marc Buckland, stars Matt Barr as Mick, Sarah Wright Olsen as Joey, and Ben Aldridge as Chaz Scenes for the pilot were filmed on location in New Orleans, Louisiana in April, 2018. The pilot was not picked up to series.

On March 5, 2025, Variety reported that HBO Max will develop a 1-hour dramedy television series adaptation of Skinny Dip with Edward Kitsis & Adam Horowitz writing & executive producing with Bill Lawrence, who also produced the miniseries adaptation of Hiaasen's novel Bad Monkey. By December, the series had moved from HBO to Amazon, and Amanda Seyfried was cast as Joey.

Reception

The bestseller was highly commended by Publishers Weekly stating that "his is vintage Hiaasen, with some wonderfully likable characters as well as his signature obnoxious heavies, and the plot is a delightful mixture of farce and suspense." While Kirkus reviewed it as "bitingly satirical, sublimely zany, and deeply satisfying."