Scat

Mrs. Starch is a biology teacher at the Truman School. She is demanding, authoritative, and universally feared; local rumors and school folklore suggest that she murdered her husband and practices black magic. Her disappearance on a school field trip to the Everglades is the central mystery that drives the novel’s plot. Nick and Marta’s investigation of this mystery gradually reveals a more and more sympathetic character: though she is introduced as a strict educator who will resort to using humiliation and fear to make her point, she reappears toward the end as a true mother, bottle-feeding the baby panther and guiding the motherless Duane Jr. toward a virtuous, constructive future. 

Duane Jr. is an outsider in Nick and Marta’s class at the Truman School—not a bully, Nick is careful to note, but a weird, overgrown kid with subpar hygiene and two arson charges on his juvenile record. Duane Jr., who likes to go by “Smoke,” comes from a privileged but unstable home; his mother, from the wealthy Winship family, abandoned her husband and son several years earlier to move to Paris, and his father is a highly cultured but unemployed eccentric who is easily cowed by his rich mother-in-law and his talkative parrot. Duane Jr. is a skilled tracker with a rich, intuitive understanding of the local wetlands. With the help of Twilly Spree and Mrs. Starch Smoke undergoes a radical transformation over the course of the novel, from a wild, pencil-eating troublemaker to a well-groomed and responsible young man.

Twilly Spree is an enigmatic character first introduced in Hiaasen’s 2000 novel Sick Puppy. Spree is independently wealthy and a militant environmentalist, using his inherited millions to live off the grid and defend the Everglades by any means necessary. Within the novel’s realistic world, Twilly Spree feels like something of a fantastical character, as he swoops onto the scene in his helicopter to help catch the bad guys; he is the good millionaire needed to fight the bad ones. 

Marta is Nick’s classmate and best friend. She is talkative, outspoken, and somewhat high-strung: Mrs. Starch’s aggressive teaching style has caused her to vomit from anxiety before. She nevertheless supports Nick in his efforts to find Mrs. Starch and defend Duane Jr. from false allegations, even when he leads her into risky and terrifying situations.

Drake is the president of the Red Diamond Energy Corporation and the novel’s central villain, a rich developer who hatches a scheme to drill for oil in a federally protected region of the Florida Everglades. McBride is arrogant, ignorant, wasteful, and without scruples; however, he is too stupid to pull off his nefarious schemes successfully.