What a SUCK-FEST! This is the worst book I've read in a long time. The (unlucky) 13 authors seem only slightly concerned with plot continuity, and the result is like a novel with every third page torn out. Characters come and go, and come back again for no apparent reason, other than to satisfy the authors' self-indulgent egos. In particular, the chapters by Elmore Leonard and Vicki Hendricks were appallingly bad. Hendricks ignores all the preceeding chapters and suddenly changes the eponymous manatee from an aquatic pinhead into some amalgam of Lassie and the Hardy Boys. In a later chapter Carl Hiaasen openly mocks this sudden swerve in character. (Tip: avoid books where one co-author ridicules another co-author's writing) Elmore Leonard contributes a time capsule that might have been hip 25 years ago, with a black character refering to someone as a "cat", and in the very next sentence actually using the phase "shuck and jive". I am very happy I checked this book out of the library, instead of squandering 22.95 on this train wreck of a book

OK, thirteen of Miami's favorite writers are sitting around a campfire (this isn't a joke). Dave Barry kicks off a story involving a couple hit men, a manatee, a 102-year-old woman and a box containing the head of Fidel Castro, and passes it to the writer to the left. The next eleven writers circle the story around the campfire in an attempt to blend this motley cast of characters (and heads) into the literary equivalent of a refreshing Miami Beach smoothee.

Throwing in monkey wrenches, stranger characters and even more heads-in-boxes in the process, they mostly succeed in creating a wholly unbelievable, extremely offbeat and wildly entertaining mystery. Poor Carl Hiassen (of Striptease fame) is challenged with tying up all the loose ends without playing the Demi Moore card, and succeeds in delivering an ending as strange as a manatee is large.

Above all an interesting experiment, Naked Came the Manatee is also an entertaining quick read.

Booger is the answer to the walls talking. Suspend belief and enter the world of a manatee that thinks, feels and reasons like us. He becomes involved in a mystery not as a victim, but as a participant in important events. The concept of a manatee detective aiding the likes of Brit Montero in solving the case of the Castro heads is only exceeded by the writing of this by the many different writers, from Dave Barry to Carl Hiaasen. No mystery should be this much fun