[1] It involves a murder plot and a subsequent attempt to exact revenge against the backdrop of a threat to Florida's Everglades National Park.

Skinny Dip refers to the fact that when Joey Perrone is thrown overboard the impact when hitting the surface of the water tears off all her clothes so that on the following morning her rescuer finds her not only completely exhausted but also stark naked.

Charles Regis "Chaz" Perrone is a young marine biologist who has devoted his life solely to the lazy pursuit of a hedonistic existence.

His insatiable greed drives him to collude with Samuel Johnson "Red" Hammernut, a crooked farm tycoon who owns large vegetable fields north of the Florida Everglades, which he relentlessly pollutes with fertilizer run-off.

Karl Rolvaag, a Broward County detective investigating the disappearance, is suspicious of Chaz's mannerisms but can find no motive supporting a suspicion of murder.

Both Mick and Karl, working independently, trace the bill of sale for Chaz's expensive Hummer to one of Red's companies, and patient investigation leads them to discover the Everglades scam.

Her brother Corbett, a reclusive sheep farmer in New Zealand, flies to Miami and hires a squadron of helicopters to buzz Chaz's Hummer on his way to the Everglades, then arranges a memorial service for Joey at which he is expected to give a speech.

Another of Joey's accomplices, a friend from her book club named Rose Jewell, approaches Chaz and offers to console him over dinner at her place.

The following morning, Chaz wakes up from his drug-induced slumber sitting naked at the wheel of his Hummer, which has been parked on the shoulder of a busy road during rush hour.

On the way home to Red's farm, the entrepreneur insults Tool, who takes revenge by killing him and impaling his body on the roadside.

Tool is left with all the money, deciding to spend the first part of it on a veterinarian who removes two bullets from his body, and the second on a new pickup truck in which he embarks on a trip to Canada.

[2] In his review of Strip Tease, Donald E. Westlake commented that, at the center of all the wackiness was an accessible, touching storyline: a single mother's quest to rescue her young daughter from a reckless husband and an inadequate foster care system.

This gives the novel more focus than some of Hiaasen's other books, which often involve the characters running across each other in random ways, or going on unplanned wanderings across Florida.

Somewhere along the way, the two plot lines converge, and the quest to take revenge on Chaz becomes tied up with the aim of stopping Red's pollution.

Skinny Dip is also enriched by a variety of subplots: Tool's gradual moral awakening, as he grows closer to a dying old lady who is too proud to admit that she has been abandoned by her family; Karl Rolvaag's longing for his native Minnesota, and his search for his escaped pet pythons; Chaz's obsession with sex and his desperate attempts to reverse the erectile dysfunction which is his only sign of guilt over Joey's murder, including experimenting with a black-market version of Viagra – "the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) definitely would not approve.

In a similar situation, Chaz, expecting sex with Rose, is drunk and drugged and lured into bed, not knowing that the woman he's groping for is in fact his wife.

In his review of Skinny Dip for The New Republic, Washington Post reporter Michael Grunwald criticized the book as being too fictionalized, and potentially misleading, in describing the causes of the Everglades' ecological status.

In Hiaasen's scenario, the Everglades are dying as a result of agricultural contaminants dumped by greedy corporate villains, aided and abetted by corrupt or complacent officials.

Grunwald says that when conservation efforts should focus on curtailing the effects of public activity, it is misleading and dangerous to lay all the blame on "bad guys" personified by Red Hammernut and Chaz.

On the other hand, Grunwald agrees that it is "smart to be cynical" about Florida politics, "especially all the daily blathering about conserving our precious natural resources."

A recurring theme in Grunwald's book, The Swamp, is that for the majority of Florida's history, the Everglades has been viewed as a hostile territory, a nuisance, or an obstacle to growth, and only very recently has perception changed to regard it as a place worth saving.