'Squeeze Me': Riotous sendup of the filthy rich

Lampooning the rich is a longtime American literary pastime, and no writer has ever been blessed with more fertile territory in that regard Carl Hiaasen, who once again uses Palm Beach, Florida as the setting for his new novel, "Squeeze Me."

On the very first page we meet Kiki Pew Fitzsimmons, of the "aerosol Pews" and one of a Trump-loving band of hard-drinking, bejeweled heiresses. At a ball in the President's honor, they serenade him with a song they made up, "Big Unimpeachable You."

Poor Kiki misses that splendid event, however, because by then she has tipsily fallen into a pond during the Irritable Bowel Syndrome gala at Limpid House and been devoured by a 20-foot Burmese python.

There's a cover-up, of course, that eliminates the snake from the public scenario and has Kiki instead done in by a "terrorist," an unlucky wrong-place/wrong-time Honduran asylum-seeker named Diego Beltran.

Hiaasen can always be relied on to give readers a likable, good-hearted, beset young female protagonist to fight for justice, and Angie Armstrong is great fun to follow around. A former park ranger who did jail time for assaulting a poacher, Angie runs a business called Discreet Captures, ridding homes and businesses of overdeveloped Florida's many animal intruders.

Angie is called in to deal with the original python as well as others that start turning up. Having figured out what's really going on, Angie must obtain the assistance of, among others, an honest local cop, the Secret Service and the first lady of the United States. There is also Mockingbird, the spouse of an outlandish Secret Service agent named Mastodon, who is sympathetically portrayed here. She finds pleasant distraction from her tedious duties and her ghastly husband in a raucous affair with another agent named Keith Josephson.

Hiaasen's narrative wanders around a bit randomly, but with all the lovingly biting detail there isn't a page here that flags. Even the Palm Beach high society names are choice. Kiki's best friend is Fay Alex Riptoad of the "compost and iron ore Riptoads." Then there are the McMarmots, Tripp Teabull, Yirma Skyy Frick of the personal-lubricant Fricks, and Kiki's stepsons, Chase and Chance Cornbright. Mastodon's mansion/private club is Casa Bellicosa. Among the upcoming charity events threatened by the python scourge are the Psoriatic Gingivitis Gala and the Peyronie's Syndrome Ball. Everybody's artificially bronzed and cantilevered, and a crucial you-see-it-coming-and-can't-wait plot point involves POTUS's malfunctioning tanning bed.

Hiaasen's old reliable deus ex machina character, much beloved by his fans — former Florida Gov. Clinton "Skink" Tyree — even shows up to help Angie provide Mastodon with a dose of his own bad medicine. The crazy-sane environmentalist emerges from the swamps where he resides among the snakes and shows Angie the baby iguana recently hatched from an egg he incubated in a most unusual way. It's a joke, but is it any grosser or daffier than what the nation witnesses daily on cable news?