You've read the fiction of Carl Hiaasen and Charles Willeford. Reading a little about the Bay of Pigs and the Kennedy Assassination has given you a little more of a clue. But you haven't got the full picture. Now how much worse do you think the reality could be? What is it like to live in Florida - in those cities whose names such as Miami and Fort Lauderdale, and areas such as Broward and Dade County, seem just like filling? If there is one thing missing from this book it is a map of southern Florida to make sense of the names, but if you already own a map that's probably because you've been there and it is now in your heirs' possession.

In 1985 Hiaasen began writing twice weekly columns for the Miami Herald, and now Diane Stevenson has selected more than 200 of them, put them into eighteen themed chapters, each chapter with its columns in chronological order. The one noticable difference with his fiction is that these columns are written in American newspaperese ("Said John Smith, visiting from London, England: "These columns are written in American newspaperese."), but the life on which Hiaasen writes is the life we have come to know. And thanks to the way that Florida has developed that means that even a set of newspaper columns can read like a novel. It has a plot, mainly because so many of the characters who control the state are plotting. Find someone standing for elected office - then follow his names in the chapters on state government corruption, weather damage, ecological disaster. His or her rival in the election will occur in the chapters on the tourist industry, drug smuggling and murder. As Hiaasen points out some of these characters have electoral war-chests of half a million dollars when running for an office which pays $6000 p.a. - which means, and Hiaasen was an investigative journalist before moving to columns, that there are other figures behind them who expect returns. People come and go through the years - mainly while they are making bail, sometimes while they are in the slammer. And some of these characters have managed to be many things at once: the Latin Builder's Association is one his betes noir, responsible for both gerry-building the houses blown away in Hurricane Andrew, and as a cash and social centre for these Cuban emigres to plan the next invasion of their home island. An early chapter points out the devastating effect of firearm availability, if only because that Mariel rocket launcher is likely to end up in the back of a burglar's pick-up.

Now these have been the people for whom Hiaasen can identify some sort of motive - crummy, low-life, slimeball - at least you get an idea of what drives these people. Now just wait till you get to the whackos, whose actions are completely gratuitous. At some point those guns are going to get into their hands. Hiaasen has the stories.

And while this has gone on, the fruit and sugar companies have been draining away the water from the Everglades. In a last, short chapter there is a list of small victories - some of them no more than the restoration of a river, others a crook actually being convicted. His sentence, as another column points out, "short".

Florida - "cheap holidays in other people's misery", I'm surprised Hiaasen doesn't quote it.