Kiki Pew Fitzsimmons is an emaciated, twice-widowed socialite who is proud to call herself a founding member of the “Potussies,” a group of jewel-encrusted heiresses hanging onto the president’s every word. Knowing the news and paying attention shape the fast-flowing current beneath Squeeze Me’s salty, scummy Florida scenery. “He spent his whole gifted career as a journalist,” Hiaasen wrote after the shooting, “and he believed profoundly in the craft and mission of serving the public’s right to know the news.” With Squeeze Me, Rob could not have hoped for a finer tribute. It is to his brother that Hiaasen dedicates Squeeze Me.
Hiaasen’s brother, Rob, an editor and columnist, was among the dead. In June 2018, a 30-year-old white man stormed the offices of the Capital Gazette, a newspaper in Annapolis, Md., shooting and killing five persons.
Hiaasen has even more reason to be angry than the rest of us. Of course, given that it’s Hiaasen writing, the serious answer is followed by a wink. “It’s no longer possible to look away and live with myself,” Skink replies. Has he noticed that America is being assaulted by a president who is “paranoid, draft-dodging, whore-hopping?” Tile says he’d thought Skink had long ago given up. Skink wants to know if Tile is following the news. Some ways through the novel, Skink, a one-eyed, white former governor living on a remote island in the Everglades, poses a question to his best friend, Tile, a retired black state trooper. To bring home his messages, he reprises two beloved characters, Skink and Jim Tile. With the book, Hiaasen returns to his favorite genre, the eco-crime caper, to eviscerate Donald Trump and champion Florida’s vanishing wetlands. Leave it to satirist Carl Hiaasen to name the house band at Casa Bellicosa “The Collusionists.” Casa Bellicosa, a thinly disguised stand-in for Mar-a-Lago, is the Palm Beach setting at the center of Hiaasen’s new novel, Squeeze Me. Carl Hiaasen’s latest novel, Squeeze Me, was published by Knopf on Aug.
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