First Sentence: “At the stroke of eleven on a cool April night, a woman named Joey Perrone went overboard from a luxury deck of the cruise liner M.V. Sun Duchess.”
The first couple pages have Joey swimming for her life—we don’t know why she’s suddenly overboard on her anniversary cruise, but the string of insults toward her husband make it doubtful that this was an accident. The narrative from Joey’s POV is clear-headed, intelligent, and bitingly sarcastic—we know this woman is strong and collected in the face of disaster, which shows a lot about who she is as a person.
The POV shifts on page six to Chaz, Joey’s husband of two years. It becomes immediately clear that he has pitched his wife overboard, and he is markedly callous and calculating—this is something he’s been planning since they embarked from Boca Raton. His motives, however, are still a mystery as he climbs into bed, setting his alarm for six hours hence to report her missing.
As Joey swims, she lists the things Chaz didn’t like about her, chewy chicken as number one. What on earth is the motive? Chapter one ends on page 10 with this big question.
Chapter two cements Chaz’s personality as a “cheat and a maggot,” but even he admits murder is out of character. During his interview with the detective investigating his wife’s disappearance, Chaz is calculating to the extreme: rubbing his eyes and biting his lip to play the part of the distraught husband.
Joey’s fate in the Atlantic is unclear, the narrative turning instead to her parents’ bizarre death (a Russian dancing bear was probably responsible for their plane’s nosedive) and it is revealed that Joey and her brother inherited a huge amount of money. A possible motive for Chaz?
After her parent’s death, a first marriage leaving her widowed and even more wealthy, and a string of disappointing relationships, Joey meets Chaz at SeaWorld when she tackles a purse-snatcher. The first year of marriage is virile, to be sure, but the second year had been “revelatory.” On page 18 she questions why he married her in the first place.
The motive of inheritance money is shot down on the same page—the money is untouchable if something happens to her.
Finally, at the end of chapter two, Joey is “parched and delirious and half-blind, clinging to the same fucking shark that tried to eat me.” Then she is rescued from the cusp of death in a short, hallucinatory paragraph—the chapter ends on page 19.
Mick, her rescuer, had plucked her off a floating bale of marijuana. Joey is still temporarily blind (salt water and jellyfish stings) and has to trust the good nature of Mick, a suggestively single guy, while she recuperates on an island somewhere.
Meanwhile, Chaz gets a scare that Joey’s body has been found on page 23 when a fisherman bags a corpse, then again when he is contacted by the local news. He sticks to his story and maintains the façade of concerned husband. This episode is punctuated with a call to Ricca, an apparent lover and someone privy to some other mysterious information: “Maybe she found out about us… Maybe she found out about something else.”
Chapter four begins on page 30 with Mick Stranahan fishing from a sturdy house on the tiny island as Joey recovers inside. He is a 53-year-old retired investigator, living as a caretaker for a Mexican novelist who rarely visits the house he owns. Over a dinner of the snappers Mick had caught, they flirt, catch up on past relationships, and ponder Joey’s next move. She stubbornly refuses to call the police, citing that it will be her word against Chaz’s.
Meanwhile, chapter four wraps up on pages 37-39 with Inspector Rolvaag sipping coffee at a truck stop with Captain Gallo. Rolvaag instinctually doesn’t like Chaz and doesn’t believe he’s telling the whole truth, mentioning that he’s saying everything right, as if it’s been scripted. Gallo advises Rolvaag to slip the case to the bottom of the pile, giving it a timeline of six days before the case is closed.
Chapter five flashes back to Chaz’s less-than-impressive college education: “During those pre-med years he spent more time in condoms than he did in the stacks.” Chaz’s personality truly is that of a cheat and a maggot, finally graduating with a Masters in marine biology in large part due to nepotism.
Page 44 introduces Red Hammernut, Chaz’s boss. It’s clear from the Chaz’s college education and brief job as a “biostitute” that money is his only concern. Red is a scorpion-hearted man who feigns sympathy over Joey’s disappearance from a sport fishing trip.
Joey finally unwraps her eyes (they had been covered until then) and unceremoniously shoves off the island in Mick’s boat toward Miami. When Mick awakes to find his boat gone, his only modicum of surprise it that this time it’s not one of his ex-wives doing the stealing. He climbs into a kayak, reaching the boat in 20 minutes: he had installed a gas shut-off valve for just this event. On the way back to the island, Joey reveals her idea to use her vast fortune to enact her “justice” while Mick tries to persuade her to call the cops.
A Coast Guard helicopter flies over the island, probably searching for Joey, but instead of waving it down, Mick kisses her hand. The chapter ends with their tenuous partnership and Mick saying “I must be crazy.”
I love this guy's work, but find some of his books much easier to get into than others. I think Hiassen is in top form with SKINNY DIP, in part because of everything he gets right in the opening pages.
The plot motor starts firing immediately, the characters are interesting and quite likable pretty much right off the bat, and the author isn't too heavy-handed with hints of romantic subplot between Joey and Mick. And Chaz, for all his failings, manages to come across with some charm, which in the end makes the story a lot more fun.
I loved SKIN TIGHT and SICK PUPPY, but I'd say this is one of CH's best and a great example of what a smartly -conceived opening can accomplish.
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TED is pleased to welcome New York Times bestseller Lynne Hinton to our staff as a collaborator and ghostwriter. Lynne is the author of several books including the national bestseller Friendship Cake.
