Children and teenagersReviewJosh Lacey on an ecologically-minded book for teenagers

Scat, by Carl Hiaasen (Orion, £9.99)

Like PG Wodehouse and Terry Pratchett, Carl Hiaasen always returns to the same fictional – or semi-fictionalised – world, but manages to unearth an apparently endless supply of convoluted plots and entertaining characters with improbable names. He writes densely plotted comic thrillers exposing the arrogance and greed of the politicians and businessmen who are determined to desecrate his native Florida.

His villains are rich, arrogant fools who don't hesitate before pointing a shotgun at an endangered animal or concreting over a swamp to build a new hotel; his heroes are lonely individualists who feel "much safer hiking among a few hungry gators and bears than driving down a busy road at rush hour". Scat, Hiaasen's third novel for children, follows the same formula, but never feels formulaic. The basic plot is simple. On a school trip to the Black Vine Swamp, Mrs Starch, "the most feared teacher at the Truman School", disappears during a sudden, unexplained fire. Two of her students, Nick Waters and Marta Gonzalez, decide to find her – and discover whether their classmate, a convicted arsonist nicknamed "Smoke", was really responsible for igniting the blaze.

Hiaasen interweaves a subplot describing Nick's relationship with his father, a captain fighting in Iraq, who loses his right arm when a rocket-propelled grenade hits his vehicle. Determined to share his father's disability, Nick ties his own right arm behind his back, and the two of them learn to be left-handed together. Hiaasen sensibly avoids any heavy-handed attempts to explain the rights and wrongs of the war; when Nick does some research into the causes of the conflict, he simply concludes that "he didn't want to lose his father to a war that nobody seemed able to explain."

A recent article in the Wall Street Journal condemned Hiaasen for polluting young minds with ecological propaganda. In Scat, he even points his readers towards Edward Abbey's classic novel of eco-terrorism, The Monkey Wrench Gang. (I'd be fascinated to know if any of them actually read it; Scat's teenage protagonist does track down a copy, but falls asleep after a few pages.) Whatever your political alignment, you'll find nothing dreary or didactic about Hiaasen's writing; Scat is a funny and furiously fast- moving novel populated by engaging characters and fuelled by a strong sense of moral outrage.

Josh Lacey's The One That Got Away is published by Marion Lloyd.

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