Summer is a time for reruns on TV and maybe for reruns on books as well. If you haven't picked up a work by Carl Hiaasen in a while, give "Nature Girl" a try.

It's a typically zany Hiaasen trip through Florida. Honey Santana is a trailer park-dwelling heroine who hears music in her head and has dreams of reforming the world starting with a telemarketer. She creates an elaborate plan to teach a rude phone pitchman a lesson in civility by drawing him to backwater Florida with a telemarketing scheme of her own.

No trip such as that would be complete without a man whose fingers were chewed off by crabs and subsequently reattached, albeit in the wrong places. There is also Seminole Indian who loves classic rock music and just wants to get away from the white world. And Honey's son, Fry, ends up protecting his concussion-wracked head with a Miami Dolphins football helmet.

Hiaasen has a the ability to create characters and situations that border on the absurd but not so much that you dismiss them. When he writes of the crab-nibbled victim's surgery, "?the nurses started arguing with the doctors about who'd get to keep the claws for dinner? and then the lights went out in the middle of the operation? it was a major cluster. Somehow Mr. Piejack ends up with his pinkie sewn to his thumb stump, and his thumb stitched to the nub of his index finger?" the reader shrugs and says, "Well, yeah, that could happen."

Underlying this, and the majority of Hiaasen's works, is his intense love for Florida's fragile ecology, especially the Everglades. You'll float with the characters through the waterways and islands that offer some of the most interesting and beautiful sights nature has to offer. Along the way, you'll meet a crazy cast of characters, hear a funny, even suspenseful story, and be left ready to head to the library to pick up more of Hiaasen's works.