The money's good being Carl Hiaasen, but sacrificing your last novel at the alter of Demi Moore's publicity-hungry crotch must give you the odd sleepless night. Striptease is "soon to be a major film" as they say, trumpeting all that butt-aching faux-controversy that inevitably trails Mrs Willis's tiresome trademark of dropping everything when a flashbulb detonates. You remain to be convinced.

In the meantime Hiaasen hikes in off the storm-tossed wastes of Hurricane Andrew touting his latest, the aptly titled Stormy Weather. Visitors to Florida, as obdurate ex-governor Stink will tell you, leave much to be desired. As a tourist the hurricane left a little too much: houses damaged, decimated, destroyed; people dead; lives wrecked. And a wild animal farm free from all its wild animals: loose buffalo, unshackled lions, a pack of mangy feral monkeys. And the cobras: "Augustine felt it was morally wrong to interfere. An escaped cobra had as much natural right to life in Florida as did all those retired garment workers from Queens."

It's a fool tries to sum up one of Hiaasen's free-falling Lottery ball plots. He doesn't so much deal in narrative as theme - Disney-esque parks in Native Tongue; plastic surgery disasters for Skin Tight; strippers, inevitably, with the Moore-fancied Strip Tease. It could go to explaining a certain shortcoming in this latest book - the hurricane may be cause and effect, but doesn't so much qualify as a theme. The book falls back on its characters, then, some of whom, admittedly, are a real delight.

Edie Marsh has come to town to lay a fuckable Kennedy and cry rape: "Suck 'em cross-eyed, then phone the lawyers." But all she meets are hangers on to the family booty and hooks up instead with Lester Maddox Parsons, aka Snapper, to pull off a petty insurance scam after the storm's blow-through. Unfortunately they pick on Tony Torres, bent mobile home salesman whose product "took off like fucking aluminium ducks" on the first puff. Now for the residents of the trailer park it's bring me the head of Tony Torres.

Or Max, honeymooner with a camcorder who drags his suffering wife Bonnie down to survey the wreckage. She falls into the arms of the skull-juggling Augustine; he into the bear-like paws of the eco-rigid Skink for a nightmarish sally through the Everglades.

All good stuff so far as it goes, but the glue holding these particular unusual suspects together is insubstantial. Too often situations are set up just to reach their ordained (though undoubtedly superb) punchlines: Snapper is addicted to ever more extreme nuts and sluts TV; a would-be youthful gangsta is unfortunately tattooed 'Baby Raper'; the buildings inspector with spectacular ill-luck in both his marriage and Santeria sacrifices and ends up pretending to be Cuban. This is much more sketch show than cohesive comedy-drama.

Elmore Leonard is not as comic but he can control this sort of plotting better. Still, he's a fan, as are, so it's said, Jeremy Paxman, the tediously smug P.J. O'Rouke, and even Salman Rushdie. They will find much to admire and amuse in Stormy Weather, but new callers to Hiaasen country are recommended to ask advice on earlier novels at Tourist Information first.