1,001 Novels: A Library of America
Striptease (1993)
by Carl Hiaasen
Florida: 2/23
It's hard not to compare Carl Hiaasen with Elmore Leonard- both blend crime fiction with humor and they both enjoy a Florida setting for their books. Strip Tease got a movie version with peak Demi Moore and not-peak Burt Reynolds. It's mostly been forgotten but thanks to Rotten Tomatoes I can tell you that it has an 11/24 critics/audience split, which is just about as low as you can go for a mass-market R-rated film. After taking a couple states off from Audiobooks, I'm back into them for Florida because of the number of crime-fiction//detective fiction titles, favorite genres for Audiobook editions. At 15 hours (464 pages in book format), Striptease is almost unbelievably long for a work of crime-fiction. It almost amazingly manages to stay in PG13 territory despite large parts of the book taking place inside a strip club and a plot involving several murders.
Erin Grant is a classic "stripper with a heart of gold," working the exotic dancing gig so she can pay off her lawyer while she is battles her criminal ex for custody of their young daughter. Besides the length, Striptease was a relief to listen to after months of downtrodden poor people living in the rural deep south.
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