Lucky You [Hardcover]

Carl Hiaasen (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 28, 1997

Grange, Florida, is famous for its miracles--the weeping fiberglass Madonna, the Road-Stain Jesus, the stigmata man. And now it has JoLayne Lucks, unlikely winner of the state lottery.

Unfortunately, JoLayne's winning ticket isn't the only one. The other belongs to Bodean Gazzer and his raunchy sidekick, Chub, who believe they're entitled to the whole $28 million jackpot. And they need it quickly, to start their own underground militia before NATO troops invade America.

But JoLayne Lucks has her own plans for the Lotto money--an Eden-like forest in Grange must be saved from strip-malling. When Bode and Chub brutally assault her and steal her ticket, JoLayne vows to track them down, take it back--and get revenge.

The only one who can help is Tom Krome, a big-city investigative journalist now bitterly consigned to writing frothy features for a midsized central Florida newspaper. With a persuasive nudge from JoLayne, Krome is about to become part of a story that's bigger and more bizarre than anything he's ever covered.

Chasing two heavily armed psychopaths down the coast of Florida is reckless enough, but Tom's got other problems--the murderous attention of a jealous judge; an actress wife who turns fugitive to avoid divorce court; an editor who speaks in tongues; and Tom's own growing fondness for the future millionairess with whom he's risking his neck.

The pursuit takes them from the surreal streets of Grange to a buzzard-infested island deep in Florida Bay, where they finally catch up with the fledgling militia--Chub, Bode Gazzer, a newly recruited convenience-store clerk and their baffled hostage, a Hooters waitress.

The climax explodes with the hilarious mayhem that is Carl Hiaasen's hallmark. Lucky You is his funniest, most deliriously gripping novel yet.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

JoLayne Lucks has one of two winning lottery tickets each worth a cool $14 million. She plans to spend it rescuing a local plot of swampland from a strip mall developer. The holders of the other winning ticket, however, are Bode Gazzer and his sidekick, Chubb, who want the whole $28 million. Afire with paramilitary fervor, Bode and Chubb need the cash to bankroll the start-up of the White Clarion Aryans before NATO takes over America with a handicapped parking sticker scam. They steal JoLayne's ticket, but before they can cash it she mounts a hot pursuit with the help of local journalist Tom Krome. As they chase Bode and Chubb through the swamps and sleazy dives, dodging bullets and local religious fanatics, Tom and JoLayne leave a wake of mayhem and hilarity. This is Hiaasen (Naked Came the Manatee, LJ 1/97) at his wacky best?a steamy amalgam of raunch, righteousness, and riotous laughs. Highly recommended.
-?Susan Gene Clifford, Aerospace Corp., El Segundo, Cal.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews

As soon as an informative headnote warns that ``there is no approved dental use for WD-40,'' you can relax, knowing that you're in for several blissful hours in the hands of a master farceur whose subject this time is what passes in South Florida for providence. Even though she's confirmed the winning numbers on her Lotto ticket, placid veterinary assistant JoLayne Lucks refuses to give an interview to rolling-stone Register features writer Tom Krome. Hoping to rescue the turtles of Simmons Wood from mob-backed development by buying the parcel out of her half of the $28 million jackpot, she doesn't see any point in telling the world she's rich. Then, suddenly, she isn't, because the holder of the other winning ticket, halfwit white supremacist Bodean Gazzer, decides to double his own payout by heisting her ticket. Bode and his sidekick Chub have their own public-spirited vision for the prize: arming the White Rebel Brotherhood (membership 2 and growing) in preparation for the UN-sponsored invasion of the US via all those unused handicapped-parking spaces. Along with the obligatory romantic complications, Hiaasen provides an alarmingly comical parade of spiritual counterparts to the providential nostrum of the Florida lottery: the weeping fiberglass Madonna, the Road-Stain Jesus, the miraculous apostolic turtles who bring nirvana to the features editor sent to retrieve Krome after he takes off with JoLayne in pursuit of the Lotto thieves. Not even Hiaasen (Stormy Weather, 1995, etc.) can sustain this balancing act forever, and eventually it collapses like a house of cards. But for an impossibly long time, the whole wild sideshow seethes and boils with all the grinning vitality of a ``Have a Nice Day'' poster reimagined by Hieronymous Bosch. Just when you think Hiaasen can't outdo himself, he finds more lunatics who just happen to tap into your deepest fears about America. Makes you wonder. (First printing of 200,000; Book-of-the-Month Club alternate selection/Quality Paperback Book Club selection) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 353 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; 1ST edition (October 28, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679454446
• ISBN-13: 978-0679454441
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.4 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (134 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,474,923 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Carl Hiaasen was born and raised in Florida, where he still lives with his incredibly tolerant family and numerous personal demons.

A graduate of the University of Florida, at age 23 he joined The Miami Herald as a general assignment reporter and went on to work for the paper's weekly magazine and later its prize-winning investigations team. Since 1985 Hiaasen has been writing a regular column, which at one time or another has pissed off just about everybody in South Florida, including his own bosses. He has outlasted almost all of them, and his column still appears on most Sundays in The Herald's opinion-and-editorial section. It may be viewed online at www.miamiherald.com or in the actual printed edition of the newspaper, which, miraculously, is still being published.

For his journalism and commentary, Hiaasen has received numerous state and national honors, including the Damon Runyon Award from the Denver Press Club. His work has also appeared in many well-known magazines, including Sports Illustrated, Playboy, Time, Life, Esquire and, most improbably, Gourmet.

In the early 1980s, Hiaasen began writing novels with his good friend and distinguished journalist, the late William D. Montalbano. Together they produced three mystery thrillers -- Powder Burn, Trap Line and Double Whammy -- which borrowed heavily from their own reporting experiences.

Tourist Season, published in 1986, was Hiaasen's first solo novel. GQ magazine called it "one of the 10 best destination reads of all time," although it failed to frighten a single tourist away from Florida, as Hiaasen had hoped it might. His next effort, Double Whammy, was the first (and possibly the only) novel about sex, murder and corruption on the professional bass-fishing circuit.

Since then, Hiaasen has published nine others -- Skin Tight, Native Tongue, Strip Tease, Stormy Weather, Lucky You, Sick Puppy, Basket Case, Skinny Dip, The Downhill Lie and Nature Girl. Hiaasen made his children's book debut with Hoot (2002), which was awarded a Newbery Honor and spent more than two years on the New York Times bestseller lists. For young readers he went on to write the bestselling Flush (2005) and, most recently Scat (January 2009). The film version of Hoot was released in 2006, directed by Wil Shriner and produced by Jimmy Buffett and Frank Marshall. ("Hoot" is now available on DVD).

Hiaasen is also responsible for Team Rodent (1998), a wry but unsparing rant against the Disney empire and its creeping grip on the American entertainment culture. In 2008, Hiaasen came back to nonfiction with The Downhill Lie: A Hacker's Return to a Ruinous Sport. The book chronicles his harrowing and ill-advised reacquaintance with golf after a peaceful, 32-year absence.

Together, Hiaasen's novels have been published in 34 languages, which is 33 more than he is able to read or write. Still, he has reason to believe that all the foreign translations are brilliantly faithful to the original work. The London Observer has called him "America's finest satirical novelist," while Janet Maslin of the New York Times has compared him to Preston Sturges, Woody Allen and S.J. Perelman. Hiaasen re-reads those particular reviews no more than eight or nine times a day.

To prove that he doesn't just make up all the sick stuff in his fiction, Hiaasen has also published two collections of his newspaper columns, Kick A** and Paradise Screwed, both courageously edited by Diane Stevenson and faithfully kept in print by the University Press of Florida.

One of Hiaasen's previous novels, Strip Tease, became a major motion-picture in 1996 starring Demi Moore, and directed by Andrew Bergman. Despite what some critics said, Hiaasen continues to insist that the scene featuring Burt Reynolds slathered from his neck to his toes with Vaseline is one of the high points in modern American cinema.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

31 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Better than the Reviews Here Would Indicate, December 4, 2000

By 

J. Mullin (Plantation, FL USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Lucky You (Hardcover)

Reading a Carl Hiaasen novel is somewhat of a guilty pleasure for me, as I am indirectly a target of many of Carl's jokes being a South Florida lawyer. However, whenever I am temporarily tired of heavy prose or detailed non-fiction and in the mood for a "quick fix", a page turner written with humor and a little suspense by an author who doesn't take himself too seriously , I pick up a novel by someone like Hiaasen or Kinky Friedman. You will not find the "young handsome hero gets chased by the CIA and/or FBI as he falls in love with the beautiful Supreme Court law clerk" nonsense of thrillers by Baldacci and Grisham, just some goofball characters giving Florida a bad name who ultimately get what's coming to them.

In Lucky You, the plot centers around a Lotto ticket stolen from a female African American veterinary assistant by two bizarre rascists, who envision forming a neo-Nazi militia with the extra 14 million bucks. The two hapless crooks, Bode Gazzer and Chub, have one 14 million dollar winning ticket of their own, but with taxes and extended payouts they assume 14 million will be insufficient for their grandiose plans, and thus they pilfer the other winning ticket.

Our heroine, ridiculously named JoLayne Lucks, is everything a character should be in Hiaasen's world - she loves nature, is kind to animals, and wants to use her winnings to buy a pristine plot of land and prevent some Mafia developers from bulldozing the whole thing for a tax-shelter shopping mall. She lives in tiny Grange, Florida, a city known for its religious "miracles" including the self-mutilated "stigmata" man, a lady who thinks a road stain of brake fluid depicts the face of Christ, and a shrine to the Blessed Virgin which, on command, emits tears. These tears, scented with cheap perfume, are operated surreptitiously through a hidden hydraulic pump. All of these scandalous gags are meant to fleece tourists, on holy pilgrimages, out of their modest earnings. The straight man in the novel, features writer Tom Krome, goes to Grange to write a story on the lottery winner Ms. Lucks and is inexplicably drawn into her efforts to get the ticket back from Chub and Gazzer.

As in all Hiaasen books, the slimy characters get what is coming to them, and for the most part the author keeps most of the balls in the air effectively, keeping the reader mildly interested in the sensational plot even though you knowingly suspend belief from page one. The book has its faults to be sure- I wish Hiaasen would not be so over the top with his names, like a lottery winner named "Lucks", and a neo-Nazi named "Gazzer." Also, I thought the actions of Sinclair, Krome's boss at the paper, should have been deleted by a sympathetic editor. Sinclair, trying his best to catch up with Tom Krome, heads to Grange where he proceeds to sit in a moat full of turtles (painted like religious figures) and utters nonsense babble in rapturous delirium. These passages, unlike most of the book, were difficult to read.

All in all, while Hiaasen will never be confused with F. Scott Fitzgerald or Henry James, he has written a very entertaining novel here with passages that were downright hilarious. Some here... have insisted that Lucky You is his worst novel, which still would not be that bad in my opinion. As for my own "ranking order," I certainly feel Lucky You was every bit as good as Strip Tease and Stormy Weather, maybe a spot below Native Tongue and Tourist Season, but who cares? Ranking them is like comparing different types of melon. If you like his style, you'll enjoy this novel. I give it 4 stars, and am glad I picked it up.

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of Hiassen's funniest, September 1, 2006

By 

J. Norburn (Quesnel, BC, Canada) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Lucky You (Mass Market Paperback)

From time to time I recommend Hiassen's books to coworkers, friends, and family. A few have become fans like me, but many others end up giving the books back to me(looking a little uncomfortable as they do) and never look at me the same way again.

These people stop asking for my advice on reading material. Apparently, not everyone appreciates Hiassen's sense of humour.

I've read all of Hiaasen's books and consider Lucky You to be one of my favourites (Strip Tease, Stormy Weather, and Sick Puppy are the others). Hiaasen turns his outrage (in this case directed at land developers, religious scam artists, the newspaper business, and red neck militia wingnuts) into a hysterically bizarre novel about two militia wannabes who win the lottery, but decide that if they can find the owner of the other winning ticket, they can double their take.

Sure, the targets here are easy to take potshots at (racist morons with guns and religious zealots) but that doesn't mean it isn't funny to watch Hiassen open fire.

If you are looking for a nail biting suspense thriller, Lucky You probably won't do it for you. Hiassen may give readers a rollicking ride, but this zany plot with its collection of quirky characters won't satisfy anyone looking for a serious thriller. Lucky You won't leave you breathless with white-knuckled thrills, but you may laugh so hard you can't see through the tears.

Read this book if you like a little twisted humour with your crime fiction.

Don't read this book if you belong to a militia or have ever seen Jesus' face appear to you in a plate of mashed potatoes. There is a good chance that you won't appreciate Hiassen's unique brand of humour..

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars As Good As He Gets, December 4, 1997

By 

Robert Derenthal "bucherwurm" (California United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Lucky You (Hardcover)

Entertainment Weekly didn't think this book was that great. ER is crazy; this is Hiaasen at his best. Carl provides me with real "comfort" books, ones that I can curl up with, forget the world and just laugh and laugh. The only problem with this and his other books is that it ends.
The only criticism that I would make is that Hiaasen sometimes try to carry his "hilarity" into descriptions of violent or unpleasant death. There are some things that just aren't funny.