Tourist Season (novel)
Tourist Season is a 1986 novel by Carl Hiaasen. It was his first solo novel, after co-writing several mystery/thriller novels with William Montalbano. Plot. "Las Noches de Diciembre" (Spanish, "The Nights of December") is a small terrorist cell led by rogue newspaper columnist Skip Wiley, calling himself "El Fuego". Skip believes that the only way to save Florida's natural beauty from destruction is to violently dissuade tourists from visiting and/or settling in the state. Recruiting three comrades with similar vendettas against the Florida establishment, they begin a spree of flashy kidnappings, murders, and bombings  to frighten off new arrivals into the Sunshine State. Their first victim is B.D. "Sparky" Harper, the head of Miami's Chamber of Commerce. Sparky's body is found stuffed into an oversized suitcase, dressed in a garish tourist outfit, smeared with sunscreen, and with his legs amputated. Next, the group starts kidnapping and killing random tourists and Florida residents, many of whom are fed to a giant crocodile nicknamed "Pavlov". Brian Keyes, a private investigator and former reporter for the Miami "Sun", is hired to help defend petty burglar Ernesto Cabal, who was caught driving Sparky's stolen car . Brian does not believe that Ernesto killed Sparky, but the Miami police dismiss him. Ernesto commits suicide when told by his own lawyer that the case is a lost cause. Brian is then hired by Nell Bellamy to find her missing husband (the first tourist victim), and by "Sun" editor Cab Mulcahy to locate the missing Wiley. After an encounter with his ex-girlfriend Jenna (who is now dating Skip), Brian tracks Skip to the Everglades and is captured by "Las Noches". Revealing himself, Skip tells Brian to return to Miami and spread the word of the group's demands . He then has Brian watch as their latest victim is fed to Pavlov. Brian tries to stop the murder and is stabbed in the back by one of Skip's followers, a Cuban named Jesús Bernal. He is returned to Miami and treated in the hospital. Since it is the start of the tourist season, the police's initial reaction to Brian's warnings is to engage in a cover-up, dismissing the "Las Noches" communiques as a hoax. "Sun" reporter Ricky Bloodworth uncovers the letters and writes an article, but misspells the name of the group as "Las "Nachos . The terrorists retaliate by triggering several bombs in public places, forcing the authorities to take them seriously. Brian's old friend, Detective Al Garcia is appointed head of a task force to catch the terrorists. Based on Skip's hints, Brian, Cab, and Al deduce that the terrorists plan to kidnap Miami's much-touted Orange Bowl Queen. Since civic leaders refuse to cancel the Orange Bowl Parade or to provide the beauty queen with visible police protection, Al suggests hiring Brian as her undercover bodyguard. Brian finds the beauty queen, Kara Lynn Shivers, to be an intelligent and sensible  girl who is only in the beauty queen "racket" to indulge her father. Brian and Kara Lynn grow closer, eventually developing a relationship. While escorting Kara Lynn home from a tennis game, Brian catches Jesús loitering in the parking lot and beats him into submission with a tennis racket. Furious that Jesús has foiled the group's element of surprise, Skip devises a new plan. Jesús, aching for reinstatement with the anti-Castro terrorist group he was expelled from, abandons "Las Noches" and sends a mail bomb to Al. Farcically, the bomb is instead opened by an over-eager Ricky , illegally sifting Garcia's mail for clues about the terrorists. Because of Bernal's poor construction, the bomb only injures Ricky. Al never learns that the bomb was addressed to him, and the bombing is attributed to "Las Noches". The next evening, Skip buzzes the deck of a cruise ship in a helicopter and bombards the deck with shopping bags containing live snakes. As the panicked passengers dive off the ship and the Coast Guard is summoned, Skip's helicopter unexpectedly crashes at sea before it reaches land. No bodies are recovered. Miami's civic leaders assume the terrorists are  dead, but Brian and Al insist that their security precautions remain in place until after the parade. In a last-ditch effort, Jesús kidnaps Al at gunpoint and drives him to Key Largo to be executed. Al is wounded in the shoulder by Jesús's shotgun, but Brian manages to track them down and kills Jesús. To Brian's surprise, the parade proceeds without any sign of "Las Noches". The following evening, during the Orange Bowl, he belatedly realizes that Kara Lynn is supposed to make a brief appearance during the game's halftime show, and figures out that "Las  Noches" has chosen that moment to strike. Kara Lynn is kidnapped and carried out of the stadium on an airboat, though one of the terrorists, ex-football player "Viceroy" Wilson, is shot to death by her unofficial escort. Brian deduces from Skip's old press clippings that he has taken Kara Lynn to Osprey Island, a small nature preserve in the middle of Biscayne Bay. There, Skip reveals to Kara Lynn that the island has been mined with dynamite, to be exploded at dawn, to allow for the construction of a new condominium. He plans to leave her there, with  the island's other remaining wildlife, so that her death will send a message to Florida's greedy developers. Before Skip can depart, Brian arrives and disables him with a bullet to the leg. Skip initially refuses to tell Brian where he has anchored his boat, prepared to let the dynamite claim the three of them all at once. However, upon realizing that Brian has brought Jenna along, he surrenders the boat's location. To Brian's surprise, he refuses to go along with them. As they speed away from the island, Keyes, Kara Lynn, and Jenna look back and  see Skip is climbing a tree, trying to scare a bald eagle nesting there into taking flight before the dynamite explodes. The novel ends just as the "all clear" signal for the detonation is sounded, with the three of them whispering the same prayer: "Please fly away." Themes. The book is not only an example of the crime fiction genre, but a satire as well, of many subjects from tourism to sports to race relations to the newsroom. It also contains examples of the literary device of the red herring; for example, deep background is given to characters who appear  briefly only to die off, which keeps the reader guessing as to who will make it to the end of the book. Hiaasen is a newspaper columnist from the "Miami Herald". In an interview, he said that he took much of his inspiration from his work on the "Herald". Readers may believe that Skip Wiley is a slightly more crazed version of the author; both are newspaper columnists, and both are very passionate and entertaining writers. One theme that persists in the book is moral ambiguity; while Brian Keyes understands the value of Skip Wiley's ends, Keyes would have  preferred a less violent means. Their conflict arises as a matter of where they place their allegiance: Brian Keyes to humankind, and Skip Wiley to the wild. Hiaasen's novels typically deal with distinctly Floridian themes such as environmental destruction of unique ecosystems, the inability to sustain rapid growth, and crooked politicians, among others. Other media. An audiobook version of "Tourist Season" was released in 1998 by Recorded Books. The audiobook, read by George Wilson, is unabridged and runs 13 hours 48 minutes over 12 CDs.