Tourist Season was published by Putnam in 1986, Hiaasen’s first solo novel after three co-authored thrillers with William Montalbano. It established the formula that would make him the defining comic novelist of Florida: ecological outrage channeled through absurdist crime plots, with villains who are simultaneously terrifying and hilarious.
Skip Wiley, a brilliant but unhinged Miami newspaper columnist, disappears and resurfaces as the leader of “Las Noches de Diciembre” — a terrorist organization dedicated to destroying the Florida tourist industry. His cell includes a retired Seminole Indian, a disgraced Cuban football player, and an enormous crocodile. Their campaign begins with the abduction and murder of the president of the Greater Miami Chamber of Commerce (fed to the crocodile, which is then released in a luggage carousel at Miami International Airport) and escalates toward an assault on the Orange Bowl parade on New Year’s Eve.
Brian Keyes, a former journalist turned private detective and Wiley’s former colleague, is hired to investigate. The novel’s dark comedy comes from the reader’s half-sympathy with Wiley’s cause — South Florida has been destroyed by overdevelopment — expressed through methods that are monstrous.
Collecting Tourist Season
First edition (Putnam, New York, 1986): Boards with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine in jacket: $100–$300
- Very good in jacket: $40–$100
- Signed first: $200–$500