“The thawing python hadn’t exploded so much as unzipped, exposing the reason for the lump in its belly—crumpled, corkscrewed remains of a slight, silver-haired woman cloaked in a pale gown.”
Carl Hiaasen is impressive! He has written a satirical story about the president’s Palm Beach resort. It is called Casa Bellicosa. The word “bellicosa” means fierce and warlike. The code name for the president is Mastodon. The president wonders whether he can see a mastodon in a zoo. A group of wealthy Palm Beach women who support the president calls themselves the Potussies, which is a shortened form of POTUS pussies. One of the Potussies, Kiki Pew, is eaten by a python while attending a fundraiser at a fancy Palm Beach mansion. And it goes on from there.
When an employee of the venue where Kiki succumbed to the python realizes how Kiki disappeared, he calls Angie Armstrong, a local woman who runs a critter removal business. Angie becomes a central character in the story, and when she stores the dead python before proper removal, professional criminals burgle her home and storage area. It turns out that there is more than one python found in Palm Beach and Hiassen has a field day describing the conversations of secret service agents who are protecting the president and first lady, whose code name is Mockingbird. Their involvement with local police, Angie, the Potussies, and others is hilarious and serious simultaneously: brilliant satire at its best.
