Squeeze Me by Carl Hiaasen

Angie Armstrong is an ex-con (she fed a poacher’s hand to an alligator – feels bad that they euthanized the alligator) who discreetly captures animals who are terrorizing people (at least in their minds).  She’s called to remove a python in a tree at a ritzy club in Palm Beach, where a rich, old woman has gone missing.   She was a leading member of the Potussies (don’t ask).  The python is lethargic because it ate a big meal, obvious because it’s bloated.  Angie decapitates it and puts it on ice in her truck.  She will deliver it to the State to be dissected.  When she gets home, her apartment’s been ransacked.  Then she checks on her storage, where the snake had been placed in a freezer, and it is missing.  The thieves are less than intelligent and having kidnapped the frozen snake, stop at a stripper club long enough for it to defrost and stink-up their stolen car.  They cut-open the snake, steal the jewelry and toss the woman’s corpse into a building’s freshly poured cement footing, then drive, drunk over a set of railroad tracks too fast, bouncing the trunk open and depositing the snake in the middle of the road.  Just before the secret service escort the First Lady home.  That night a boat with illegals lands on the island and on the way to find a job, one young man, Diego, crosses the same tracks and notices an unusual pink pearl and pockets it.  Then we meet POTUS, nicknamed by the secret service as Mastodon (he asked to see on in the National Zoo and was told it was on loan to another zoo), his overpriced club, Casa Bellecosa, becomes a central stage for the story. The First Lady starts an affair with a secret service agent, Kieth (really Youseff, but since POTUS doesn’t like people from ‘muslim’ countries has to use an alias ‘American’ sounding name.  Of course, POTUS is having his own affair with a stripper, who is writing a tell-all book about him.  Word that Diego has a piece of the rich woman’s jewelry, he is arrested for her murder.  POTUS uses this to stir up his base with a chant of No More Diegos. It’s up to Angie to solve the mysteries and get Diego freed.  She is visiteYhed by a retired state policeman, who gives her the coordinates in the swamp to a man she needs to meet.  Skink, the ex-governor whom Hiaasen has used in other books turns out to be letting Pythons loose all over palm beach, but swears he didn’t have anything to do with the first one, who ate the missing woman.