Murder and the morbid obituarist

Jack Tagger, a reporter on a Florida paper, the Union-Register, has been banished to the obituary column after a spat with the management. Although he's a dab hand at summing up a life, he'd rather be out in the sunshine, chasing down a Pulitzer Prize-worthy story; in addition, he's succumbed to an occupational hazard of obituarists - he's become morbid about his own death. Will he, he wonders, fall victim to the Grim Reaper at his present age, 46, like Elvis Presley, President Kennedy, George Orwell and Oscar Wilde? Or will he make 47, like Jack Kerouac, before keeling over?

When a fax from a funeral home alerts him to the death of one James Bradley Stomarti, the first thing he notices is the age at which Stomarti died in a diving accident: 36. Then it dawns on him that Stomarti is the rock musician Jimmy Stoma, of Jimmy and the Slut Puppies, one of whose singles, Basket Case ("My baby is a basket case, a bipolar mama in leather and lace"), from the album Floating Hospice, gives the novel its title. Scenting a story, he scoots off to interview the widow, Cleo Rio, known for the video of her one song, Me, in which she revealed all; and soon, in the company of his 27-year-old editor - Hendrix, Joplin, Jones, Morrison, Cobain all died at 27, he remembers - Emma, with whom a non-professional relationship quickly develops, he's in hot pursuit of Jimmy's last album and battling with an assortment of murderous thugs.

Basket Case is an amusing, fast-moving comic thriller with a pleasingly romantic subplot. It lacks that way-out, zany wackiness of Hiaasen's earlier books, though there's a fleeting glimpse of past glories when Jack belabours an intruder with the deep-frozen corpse of Colonel Tom, a Savannah monitor lizard. Generally, however, the humour is quieter: the funniest things in the book, indeed, are the titles and lyrics of assorted Slut Puppies' hits.