In South Florida, everyone wants to get a head. But not just any head. A very famous human head—severed and snugged away in a cryonic container. A head that could spark a revolution and change the course of history.
Everybody wants a piece of the noggin: rotund gangster Big Joey G., a 102-year-old environmentalist, hard-boiled Miami reporter Britt Montero, lawyer Jake Lassiter, and a would-be dictator in exile—with ex-president Jimmy Carter and a lovable manatee named Booger thrown in for good measure.
With bodies piling up it's anybody's guess what will happen from one chapter to the next, as an all-star line-up of Florida's finest writers take turns at taking this outrageously original novel to the limit—and beyond.
Booger, a manatee "whose brain was approximately the size and complexity of a bocce ball," sets the Rube Goldberg plot in motion when, at the behest of Dave Barry, he collides with a boat commandeered by a pair of equally witless thieves, sending them into the drink and their mysterious cargo—which looks an awful lot like Fidel Castro's head—into the lap of Les Standiford's contractor John Deal and his lawyer, Paul Levine's Jake Lassiter, who'll phone Edna Buchanan's peerless crime reporter Britt Montero and—well, you get the idea. Can a baker's dozen of different cooks (including James W. Hall, Carolina Hospital, Evelyn Mayerson, Tananrive Due, Brian Antoni, Vicki Hendricks, John Dufresne, and Elmore Leonard) keep this soufflé aloft? Absolutely, since the collective mythology of greater Miami—which stipulates battling environmentalists, rabid right-wing Cuba libres, vacant-eyed movie stars, TV news anchors, and visiting politicos—has become so deeply ingrained that it makes for a virtually seamless, albeit knockabout, plot. But if they can do it, can they do it well? Amazingly, the writing is mostly as neutral in tone as it is seamless; except for Dufresne's waggish parodies (his Jimmy Carter dreams of a Sonnet Sequence for Democracy that will be lapped up by "schoolchildren, illiterates, babies, cats"), there's little sense of any individual style until the final mop-up chapters by Leonard and Hiaasen, which make you realize that the whole yarn smacks of a typically outlandish Hiaasen outline fleshed out by a dozen drinking buddies—and make you wish Hiaasen had taken on the job himself.
Despite the steamy title, with its promise of sea-cow sex, the whole good-natured outing is less reminiscent of Naked Came the Stranger than of those Detection Club productions from the 1930s—The Floating Admiral, Ask a Policeman, and so on. So much for life, and art, on the cutting edge.