BASKET CASE by Carl Hiassen: A BOOK REVIEW

This is a funny pot-boiler that I recommend. Though it is not as good as some of this fine novelist's other books, you may enjoy it. I got the book as a gift and enjoyed it while I ran some morning miles.

Hiaasen's hero, Jack Tagger, is a charming investigative journalist with too big a mouth. I can relate to him. I was born with the same defect. Tagger was knocked off his hard-won perch as a newpaper's chief investigative reporter after his public denunciation of his boss, Race Maggot III, the Rupert Murdoch type owner of a Florida daily paper.

Tagger has been exiled to the obit column for the past two years. Most recently he has been bothered by his young editor, Emma, an attractive, smart woman twenty years his junior. This Generation Xer and Tagger have been fighting.

When Tagger's research into the untimely death of a famous singer leads him right into the middle of a murder investigation involving the dead singer's wife and many semi-illiterates poulating the rock music production world (some would say the underworld), Tagger and Emma find their relationship changing.

Blind ambition and greed ruined Macbeth, Nixon, untold others and surely inspired Hiassen's murderer in this tale.

Voltaire