Tattoo Blues is a rollicking and playful comic-mystery, featuring runaway rich kid Desiree Dean who discovers her prized tattoo is a fraud - the Chinese character etched on her left breast says "with hot sauce", not "magnificent animal" - and goes after the artist, and in the resulting confrontation accidentally sets his tattoo parlor ablaze. That results in a mysterious explosion that destroys the parlor and leaves the injured Desiree in the care of a lesbian clam pirate and turns the sleepy Florida Gulf Coast fishing village of Cedar Key upside down.

She goes over to Phil?s in costume and accidentally sets fire to the place. Both she and Phil disappear and a story in a Florida paper talks about the incident. Robin Chanterelles of the tabloid The Weekly Alarm is sent down to investigate. She becomes involved in the fight to save Cedar Key from a developer who wants a referendum to get the land he owns rezoned so he can build a casino which would destroy the uniqueness of the island.

This zany tale is filled with lots of off beat humor and eccentric characters that make the meandering storyline somehow always come back to the main theme of saving the island from those who would exploit it. Michael McClelland has an original and refreshing writing style that will appeal to the reader who likes to read something different on occasion. The author has the talent to put people in impossible situations and have them find a way to do what is right even if it costs them a boat load of money.

Harriet Klausner


Fun Read   March 23, 2005
 3 out of 3 found this review helpful

I thoroughly enjoyed the book. Mix a hip shooting group of Florida islanders into a lazy island setting with apparitions and tarnished journalists and sooth saying tattoo masters, throw in a sea monster and a pirate or two and a flatulent manatee, and you got exactly the book I want to read as I lie in the sand and feel the sun on my face. It's the next best thing to a frozen drink at sunset. Not as psychotic as Tim Dorsey's creations, or quite as eco-conscious as Hiassen's, the book is a well-written little adventure that's just plain fun!


Fielder's Choice   July 11, 2005
 3 out of 3 found this review helpful

Does Hiassen's political humor draw you, or is it the Dorsey wackiness that grabs your attention? McClelland does a little of each and so I am not sure if anyone is finally thrown out in this West Coast Florida twist up. Perhaps he has been caught up in the essential tolerance of Ceday Key and forgives even the bad guys. While Largo to Key West have an overgrowth of kooks and undergrowth of condo developers, Cedar Key has few such folk and so the author invents some characters and plots which do not quite fit into the "Clam Capitol of America." This makes for a sort of silly plot centered around a scheme to develop a casino on the historic dock. There is a feel the author picked up some superficial bits and pieces, but missed much of the essential Cedar Key life. Additionally the novel misses the real sub-tropical beauty of this old seaport. Certainly there is anough grist on the island for an author, yet I confess I may be holding him to a standard of "didn't do." All in all I would read this if I had it to do over, but I would not take it up as enthusiasticaly as before.


diet hiaasen at best.   February 23, 2005
 1 out of 3 found this review helpful

as a huge fan of both carl hiaasen and dave barry's hilarious characters and their ability to set them against relatively standard plots in the setting of a corrupt florida political landscape - i grabbed this on a whim in an airport bookstore (should have been a bad sign right away). mcclelland borrows heavily from both authors in concept and his attempt to create people who beg a suspension of disbelief to anyone who'd never been to florida. the similarities end quickly. instead of creating a small cast of both connected and inadvertently connected characters that are both fully fleshed out and utter self-parody, mcclelland creates an ensemble of 20+ people who only become loosely connected at the novel's predictable and uninspired conclusion. these people aren't self-satire, by florida citizen standards or otherwise. barry or hiaasen would revealed each of these players' character eccentricities by page 10 and fleshed them out. that creates humor, concept alone does not.

for a novel that claims to be a mystery and a comedy it presents only the loose potential and zero execution of both. if you, like me, were going to pick it up expecting an analogue of the other two writers' biting satire and breezy but engaging writing style - don't bother.


What fun!   November 12, 2006
This book is preposterously fun! The author continues to introduce the wonderfully eccentric characters -- it's impossible to get bored and altho the end is somewhat predictable (reason for 4 and not 5 stars), it is enjoyable, completely angst free, entertaining and leaves one feeling happy -- not a bad deal. Anxious to read more from this funny guy.