Carl Hiaasen. Wrecker. Knopf, 2023.
Whether Carl Hiaasen is writing for young teens or adults, his stories are usually set in Florida with some distinctive characters. Wrecker is no different in that respect, though it is very much an original tale.
Valdez Jones VIII, fifteen years old, is known as Wrecker because he comes from a long line of Key West salvage operators. That family tradition goes back to the 1700s with Valdez Jones I, who came from the Bahamas to Key West and stayed on. The only exception to that tradition is Valdez Jones VII, Wrecker’s father, who gets seasick.
Wrecker attends high school, but his real love and interest is boating. He owns a small outboard boat and spends much of his spare time fishing and diving around reefs and wrecks. He also has a unique after school job. A retired man who lives near him pays him fifty dollars a week to clean the gravestone of his sister every day it is not raining. The resident iguanas and feral chickens keep the cemetery markers dirty and defaced.
He usually does this after dark by climbing over the cemetery fence with a ladder and using a hose from a neighboring house. One night he hears a girl or woman singing in Spanish next to a gravestone. She disappears before he can start up a conversation.
The two gravestones catch his interest. The one he cleans has the legend “The rumor is true.” The gravestone where the singer left a vase of roses belonged to a black man hanged by the Ku Klux Klan in Key West around 1920. He wonders who would even remember that man today. Wrecker himself has a black father and white mother and tries to imagine what it would have been like back then.
One day while he was out fishing, he tries to help a speedboat that has run aground. His sixteen-footer is too small, but the man in charge of the cigarette outboard, known to us only as Silver Mustache, tosses Wrecker some money for the help. Soon Silver Mustache contacts Wrecker to drive his boat on occasion and to clean another gravesite in the cemetery. In this case there is more than just a marker, it is a mausoleum for one Bendito Vachs. This also strikes Wrecker as unusual, not because the outside of the crypt gets fouled, but because the date of death on the grave is still a few days in the future.
There are some interesting subplots, too. Wrecker’s father (“number seven”) abandoned him and his mother a long time ago to pursue an unsuccessful career at singing and writing songs. However, Wrecker does not live with his mother and stepfather but rather with his twenty-three year old stepsister. She is paralyzed from the waist down from when she was hit by a drunk driver. The settlement was generous, so she does not have to work but spends her time as an environmental activist, especially concerned with protecting the waters around the key.
Like the other book we recently reviewed, this takes place during and shortly after the Covid-19 shutdown. Wrecker’s stepfather is quite ill from the virus but does survive. His mother has different medical concerns, namely plastic surgery. Her latest attempts at beautification include a Reese Witherspoon chin and Nicole Kidman eyes.
Things get very complicated. One day while fishing, Wrecker sees a sunken speedboat that looks a lot like the one that he tried to help earlier. He dives and sees “dozens” of tightly wrapped and taped pizza boxes on the boat. He brings many of them up to his own boat, but it is weeks before the reader learns what the boxes contain. He figures the men were smuggling something, and maybe the boxes could be leverage. After all, his Valdez Jones ancestors used to brings things in from Cuba during Prohibition.
Valdez becomes friendly—just friends—with Willi, a girl in his class at school. Together they soon realize that Wrecker is in over his head. Silver Mustache’s business is indeed smuggling, among other things. The men he works with are armed bodyguards. Also Silver Mustache seems to have learned a lot about Wrecker’s family including his sister and her activism. He knows Wrecker’s phone number, and it seems as though Mr. Mustache is always changing his own phone number.
Wrecker and Willi realize that they have gotten into a relationship with people they would rather not have ever known. They want to come up with a plan to extricate themselves from that relationship before it turns deadly or Wrecker becomes a criminal in order to survive.
The story of Valdez VII, the singer, is humorous. He calls himself Austin Breakwater and seems to be ripping off Jimmy Buffett. His first song “Tequilaville Sunset” actually breaks the Billboard 100 one week because of the publicity around a lawsuit. No, Buffett is not suing him for stealing from “Margaritaville,” the Eagles are suing him for stealing from “Tequila Sunrise.”
There are a number of clever references to popular culture here, even though Wrecker himself is more interested in other things. He chooses a lock combination of 2003 because that was the year the Marlins won the World Series. He was not alive back then, but he heard talk of it so it is an easy number to remember. Willi’s favorite author is Judy Blume.
When “Austin Breakwater” is explaining to Wrecker why he is trying to make a career of singing and songwriting, he says, “This is how Jimmy Buffett started. James Taylor. Bonnie Raitt. All the greats” (86). It just so happened I saw Bonnie Raitt play at least twice that I recall before she had recorded anything. She was a terrific steel guitar player.
One of the times, she opened for James Taylor before anyone had heard of him. (It was supposed to be Chris Kristofferson, but he could not make it.) Back then, I recall Taylor being tall and very mellow. Both were at the same small venue, but the audience could really enjoy the music without having to deal with any hero worship or avid fandom as they do when the musicians become more famous and play for bigger crowds.
Wrecker is an entertaining and ecologically aware tale that YA readers will enjoy. They may even pick up bit of history and pop culture.