Carl Hiaasen

"Win Cash for Life" reads the cartoon lottery ticket on the cover of "Lucky You," Carl Hiaasen's latest crime farce. With his last book, "Strip Tease," Hiaasen, a former investigative reporter for the Miami Herald who started playing the novels 10 years ago, hit the jackpot and won himself the kind of literary freedom ordinary writers can only dream of. It's the freedom to write funny, a freedom that comes from knowing your loyal audience is going to yuck it up with you all the way to the bank.

Poor Jack Tagger, onetime investigative reporter, has been demoted to obituary writer after spouting off to a superior. And, as if this weren't punishment enough, Tagger is also plagued by fears of prematurely dying, his daily focus on the already dead seeming to exacerbate his phobia. Carl Hiaasen's new novel, "Basket Case," will give readers plenty of chuckles over the inexhaustible drives that often send us in exactly the opposite direction of where we are meaning to go.

Apparently, there are only two blue-tongued mango voles (rat-like members of the rodent family) left on the face of the earth, and in the opening pages of "Native Tongue" one of them is unceremoniously heaved out the window of a speeding blue pickup truck on a highway running between the mainland and the Florida Keys.

REGIONAL humor, like the regional accent, has suffered in the great American homogenization that occurred in the last half-century or so after World War II. In fact, genuine regional humor has to be delivered in an authentic accent to work. Think Will Rogers or the comics who honed their shtick along the Catskills' Borscht Belt.

You can't listen to what people tell you. Years ago I was asked by an agent to read a series of articles from the Philadelphia Inquirer by a young journalist named Mark Bowden. I read them and thought they were absolutely stunning. They became the book "Black Hawk Down." It was the first real explanation I had ever read of modern warfare. But Bowden was not a well-known writer, and this was a subject not a lot of people were interested in. I knew it would be hard to sell it. I took it out to a list of producers.

Any kid who has been shuttled from home to home as the result of a parent's job should understand the particular angst of Roy Eberhardt. He's barely settled into Montana at the beginning of "Hoot" when he's uprooted to Florida, his 10th locale in 14 years. As Roy confides, he is reminded how every new school experience can be different, yet oddly the same.

A judge has thrown out a former mayor's suit against the Miami Herald, saying that it is a columnist's right to call a politician "loony." Florida Circuit Court Judge Amy Dean said that Carl Hiaasen's characterizations of former Mayor Xavier Suarez as "loony," "deranged" and "paranoid" in a December 1997 column were opinion and were not purported to be fact. Dean, in a decision issued Thursday, also dismissed Suarez's allegations against former Herald political editor Tom Fiedler.

Double Whammy by Carl Hiaasen (G. P. Putnam's Sons:$16.95; 320 pages) Carl Hiaasen's "Double Whammy" is a raucous, mordant whopper of a South Florida fish story with more weird and bloodthirsty creatures found above the water than in it. There is Skink, the backwoods wild man, who dines on field animals that have been killed on highways and reads weighty books from an impressive library that holds up the walls of his dilapidated shack. He also trains a fish.

Buoyed by last year's success, the First Amendment Project again will auction off character-naming rights in forthcoming works by prominent authors, including Carl Hiaasen, Lorrie Moore and Edward P. Jones. The 2005 online auction raised $150,000 for the Oakland-based nonprofit and thrilled nearly two dozen fans who paid to see their names in print, according to Executive Director David Greene. The project is dedicated to protecting and promoting freedom of information, expression and petition.