Snakes of all kinds fill ‘Squeeze Me’

Pink pearls, pythons and a philandering president add up to a rather unusual Palm Beach social season in Carl Hiaasen’s riotously funny new novel, “Squeeze Me.”

It opens on a January night at a charity gala in Palm Beach. One attendee wanders off into the grounds. By the time her tipsy friends realize she’s missing, all that’s found on the bank of the koi pond is her beaded clutch, “her martini glass and a broken rose-colored tab of Ecstasy.”

The missing woman is Kiki Pew Fitzsimmons, hugely rich at age 72. Police drag the koi pond and review surveillance videos, but Kiki Pew and her striking necklace of rare pink pearls seem to have vanished without a trace.

A few days later, a young woman named Angie Armstrong is summoned to the club. She runs a one-person “critterremoval company, Discreet Captures.” The very nervous manager wants her to pull one of the largest Burmese pythons she’s ever seen out of a tree. This one is “deep into a post-meal stupor” and has an unusually large lump in its midsection.

This specimen’s food coma makes it fairly easy for Angie to decapitate it and carry it off to her storage freezer to await a biologist’s dissection. She hasn’t heard about Kiki Pew’s disappearance, so she’s untroubled by the lump in the snake — until someone breaks in and steals the frosty reptile.

Soon Kiki Pew’s body — having been removed from the python — is found, and one of those pink pearls leads to Diego Beltrán, an innocent undocumented immigrant, being blamed for her death.

The case becomes particularly high profile because Kiki Pew is a founding member of a group of wealthy widows who are ardent fans of the president of the United States and members of his private club in Palm Beach.

Although it’s clear who they are, Hiaasen refers to the POTUS and FLOTUS only by their Secret Service code names. His is Mastodon, which he loves because it sounds tough.

Her code name is Mockingbird, and she is in her own way as formidable a woman as Angie, though not nearly as likable as the wildlife wrangler. The two are the book’s main characters whose separate stories will collide.

All this leads to a raucous finale at the Commander’s Ball, a disfiguring tanning bed accident, just a touch of LSD and, of course, pythons. Lots and lots of pythons.