God bless America. Gone are the days when you could choose any colour so long as it was black. Now it seems you can have any colour you want; and the great unwashed want it red. Tilapia nilotica. Black and white they taste the same, but people want red, and some are prepared to kill just to prove the customer right.

Florida breeds crime-writing like rancid meat breeds flies: Robert Campbell and Elmore Leonard have set novels there; the late, exceedingly great Charles Willeford lived there; Carl Hiaasen still pens his newspaper column there. And there too James Hall, English Professor at the University of South Florida, first tried his hand at the genre with 1988's Under Cover of Daylight. Squall Line and Bones of Coral followed, each worthy, each faintly dull. It wasn't until last year's spiky buried treasure/property scam caper Hard Aground that he really hit anything like a stride.

Mean High Tide revisits the fisherman Thorn and former TV weather anchor Darcy from Squall Line, and with uncharacteristic muscle dares to see her knocked off inside the first few pages. The bizarre reasoning leads his audience inexorably back to those Tilapia -- super-breeder fish -- and the Floridians caught up in the chase to father a crowd-pleasing red selection. Along the way Hall trains up his own menagerie of state-crime misfits and malcontents. Harden Winchester, government-trained assassin turned fish-breeder, and his tomboyish daughter Sylvie whose studied naivety and sexual prowess have proved fatal for more than one man before. Or Murtha, ageing liquor store proprietor whose pseudonym hides a dark and violent past that doesn't want to stay in the shadows. Or Judy Nelson, the rather starry-eyed fisheries inspector who lost her nose to skin cancer and delights in removing the false one for dramatic effect.

The real flaw in all this, as in all Hall's novels, is a hero who stands at the book's core while these characters orbit planet-like around him. Without this cavalcade of the weird and wonderful, Thorn is a bland, plasticcy figure to whom things happen rather than, say, someone in a Leonard or Willeford, whose plots grow organically out of their own flawed heroes.

Likewise, the book grabs at an extended final showdown between just about everybody out at Winchester's farm, hinting at the same violent, taste-free absurdity much touted by Hall's friend, Hiaasen. But it unfortunately surfaces a little more macho than manic, so that even the vision of Thorn ploughing up and down the waterways lobbing grenades isn't quite as outrageous as it thinks it is.

Whatever, reservations aside, this book, like Hard Aground, has Hall firmly finding a unique voice. A little more loosening up -- and a few less pages -- and the giants of the genre would do well to keep more than half an eye to their laurels.