Skinny Dip

Joey Perrone goes over the rail of a cruise ship off the Florida coast, pushed by her husband, Chaz. He is a marine biologist who has been faking water-pollution tests on behalf of a powerful farm tycoon. Joey stays afloat through the night.

She is pulled ashore and chooses to let everyone believe she drowned. Mick Stranahan, a former state investigator, lives in a stilt house in Biscayne Bay, and he helps her. Together they plan to haunt Chaz until he admits what he did and why.

Their revenge soon runs into a larger scheme: fertilizer runoff headed for the Everglades. Around it crowd crooked cops, thugs and oddballs, among them the hermit Skink. The cast is unreliable, and nobody's loyalties hold for long.

South Florida in 2003 is the backdrop, and the caper mixes farce, romance and satire. The humor has an angry edge aimed at developers and agribusiness, and the plot stays comic even as the damage to the state is taken seriously. The question is whether Chaz breaks before the Everglades do.