NAKED CAME THE MANATEE

Thirteen top Florida writers team up, one chapter each, for this formula crime farce. Booger, a manatee "whose brain was approximately the size and complexity of a bocce ball," sets the Rube Goldberg plot in motion when, at the behest of Dave Barry, he collides with a boat commandeered by a pair of equally witless thieves, sending them into the drink and their mysterious cargo—which looks an awful lot like Fidel Castro's head—into the lap of Les Standiford's contractor John Deal and his lawyer, Paul Levine's Jake Lassiter, who'll phone Edna Buchanan's peerless crime reporter Britt Montero and—well, you get the idea. Can a baker's dozen of different cooks (including James W. Hall, Carolina Hospital, Evelyn Mayerson, Tananrive Due, Brian Antoni, Vicki Hendricks, John Dufresne, and Elmore Leonard) keep this soufflÇ aloft? Absolutely, since the collective mythology of greater Miami— which stipulates battling environmentalists, rabid right-wing Cuba libres, vacant-eyed movie stars, TV news anchors, and visiting politicos—has become so deeply ingrained that it makes for a virtually seamless, albeit knockabout, plot. But if they can do it, can they do it well? Amazingly, the writing is mostly as neutral in tone as it is seamless; except for Dufresne's waggish parodies (his Jimmy Carter dreams of a Sonnet Sequence for Democracy that will be lapped up by "schoolchildren, illiterates, babies, cats"), there's little sense of any individual style until the final mop-up chapters by Leonard and Hiaasen, which make you realize that the whole yarn smacks of a typically outlandish Hiaasen outline fleshed out by a dozen drinking buddies—and make you wish Hiaasen had taken on the job himself. Despite the steamy title, with its promise of sea-cow sex, the whole good-natured outing is less reminiscent of Naked Came the Stranger than of those Detection Club productions from the 1930s—The Floating Admiral, Ask a Policeman, and so on. So much for life, and art, on the cutting edge.