BASKET CASE is Carl Hiaasen's first novel told in the first person, that person being Jack Tagger, one-time investigative reporter, now the obituary writer on a Florida newspaper. As in Britain newspapers are changing but Jack is having difficulty changing with them - he hates to see pages of press release for skin toning clinics being printed as news, and even in the backwater to which he has been banished in disgrace he hates to see the news value of an obituary reduced.

Jack is too young to have been a child of the sixties, but the stadium rock bands of the seventies - he knows them and has their re-released CDs in his car. He is not too surprised to discover what some of these people are doing now - gardening, opening shopping malls, turning up in congress - but he is surprised to discover that Jimmy Stoma, of Jimmy and the Slut Puppies, has turned up dead after scuba-diving in the Caribbean. Jimmy seems to have been half Jim Morrison and half Gene Simmons, a cultural or anti-cultural icon, and Jack not only has a regard for the man's passing, he also knows that he has been the first person to notice. News is coming across the obituary desk, but with the nose of a hot-metal man Jack has feeling their is something more. A performer with a soul so dismal as Jimmy Stoma seems to have been accepted by the blue waters of the Caribbean too easily. Unfortunately, no one is willing to allow Jack to leave his desk - there are no expenses, and the former owner of the paper is likely to pass over at any moment. Jack's obituary's editor is a power-dressing, organisation woman who is going to allow him no leeway, so he starts to investigate in his own time.

Jack has a dead lizard in his freezer, kept with the choc-ices - he sleeps with the Dove Bars, Jack says. You can guess that for such a man a concept of "their" and "my" time is as fixed as in a Salvador Dali painting. And after some experiences of the effects of embalming on human remains as evidence we are off into a wacky world where other people have ideas just as soft of what is yours and what is mine, and what was Jimmy's and is now mine, or perhaps could be.

By an unfortunate slip of fate, Jack has an unusual aptitude for dying that makes him a good obituary writer, since he is obsessed with the ages at which individuals have died - he has been hunting down his missing father to attempt to discover what might be in the gene pool and his own likely date of demise. Jack's mother is unwilling to let him know. Some mothers are like that.

Meanwhile, as Jack discovers, some people are just mothers - like Jimmy Stoma's widow and the guys hanging around her. Unfortunately, they have ideas about what Jack has discovered and start coming unhealthily close to Jack as well.

On the other hand along the line Jack discovers that some newspaper magnates are different, and that some editors are different, and some internet striptease artistes are different. Carl Hiaasen fans, who like their violence leavened with humour will find, though, that this book is just as black as any of his others, ending in an unusual experience with an airboat. And it is possibly better plotted than LUCKY YOU. Start reading.