A middle grade novel by Carl Hiaasen published in 2009, his third such novel after Hoot and Flush.
Nick Watters's world gets turned upside down when his least-favorite teacher goes missing after a swamp fire, drawing him and his best friend Marta into a mission to save an endangered Florida Panther.
This novel has examples of the following tropes:
- Affluent Ascetic: Twilly Spree inherited $5 million from his grandfather when he was 18, invested it wisely, and is now wealthy enough to afford private jets and penthouse suites in the finest hotels. He prefers camping in the woods and canoeing around the Everglades, but will spare no expense for the sake of an animal in distress, including having pallets of bottles with zoological baby formula packed in dry ice dropped into the Everglades by private helicopter. He also pays to have the lead pipes stolen from Drake McBride's illegal oil rig barged to Haiti to irrigate farms.
- Big Bad Wannabe: Drake McBride. Every Get-Rich-Quick Scheme he's tried has failed, due to his own laziness and stupidity, and his crooked scheme to scam a payoff out of the State of Florida ends the same way, while his number two makes important decisions for their plot without even bothering to tell Drake afterward. He still does plenty of damage, though.
- Cool Old Lady: Millicent Winship, Duane Scrod, Jr.'s grandmother, is "77 years old, weigh[s] 105 pounds, and [is] as tough as a garfish."
- Corrupt Corporate Executive: Drake McBride locates his new energy company (financed by his father) in Florida because he happens to already own a waterfront condo in Tampa. Once he learns that there is no oil on the patch of land he bought, he has the idea of diverting it from a neighboring section that belongs to the State of Florida. Since the State is buying all the oil resources surrounding the Everglades, Drake reasons that all he has to do is pretend to have found oil on his land, and the State will pay him an exorbitant amount not to extract it.
- Darker and Edgier: What seems like a lighthearted animal rescue plot that would make a great Disney film gets a hard dose of darkness. While driving Nick and Marta home from their meeting with Mrs. Starch, Twilly pulls over suddenly and tells them something that no one else knows, not even Mrs. Starch or Duane, Jr.: there were two panther cubs separated from their mother in the brush fire, and one of them didn't survive the night, no matter what Twilly tried. Even if they succeed in reuniting the remaining one with his mother, nothing will bring his sibling back.
- Doting Parent: George and Gilda Carson, who are firmly convinced their son Graham is a genius and every week urge the headmaster to skip him ahead at least one and possibly two grade levels.
- Dramatically Missing the Point: Drake McBride is forced to halt his illegal oil drilling operation after an anonymous tipster reports a sighting of a Florida panther near his land. The officer from the U.S. Fish & Wildlife remarks that the animals are not only highly endangered, but also quite beautiful, and asks McBride if he's ever seen a picture of one. McBride gripes that he's seen stuffed cougars, which are legal to shoot and kill out west, and he doesn't see why panthers should be any different; his project manager Facepalms internally, reflecting that his boss couldn't have come up with a dumber thing to say, or a worse person to say it to, if he'd had a week to think it over.
- Embarrassing First Name: Duane Scrod, Jr., prefers his nickname, "Smoke".
- Fiction 500: The late Vincent Trapwick Sr. was a banker wealthy enough to establish his own Boarding School just so his kids wouldn’t have to go to school with people he considered inferior. Said kids have been losing the family fortune in increasingly embarrassing and illegal ways ever since.
- Hidden Depths:
- At first, Duane Scrod, Jr. checks all the boxes of a prototypical high school dropout - sullen and unscholarly, and frequently at odds with his teachers. But he was deeply hurt by his mother's sudden abandonment of him and his father, and it turns out he's a devoted Animal Lover and outdoorsman.
- His father, Duane, Sr., likewise strikes acquaintances as a prototypical droopy redneck, but he used to own a piano repair shop and listens to classical music all day long.
- I Reject Your Reality: Doting Parents George and Gilda Carson, who demand, on a weekly basis, that their "genius" son be skipped ahead at least one grade level. When the headmaster shows them that their son failed the aptitude tests, George just waves away the results and scoffs, "so he had one bad day, big deal!"
- Kid Has a Point: A recurring theme in nearly all of Hiaasen's young adult novels. Several of the adult characters are not bad people, but they are too occupied with their own lives to worry about animal rights, environmental issues, or municipal corruption.
- Mama Bear: Nick's mother works as a guard at the local jail. Before releasing Jimmy Lee Bayliss, she makes a point of telling him that Nick was one of the children he endangered with his arson stunt, making clear that she's keeping an eye on him and he'd better honor the agreement he made with the prosecutor to the letter.
- Meaningful Rename: The "Truman School" was originally the Trapwick Academy, but was renamed in an emergency meeting of the board of trustees after the founder's children were caught in a series of embarrassing illegal schemes. The decision was made to name it after Harry S. Truman, who was dead and therefore in no position to object.
- Missing Mom: Whitney Scrod decided that life was too short and moved to Paris to open a cheese shop, abandoning the husband who loved her and the son who needed her. Her mother, Millicent, has never cared much for her son-in-law, but her daughter's abandonment left her deeply ashamed.
- One-Word Title: Simply called Scat, after the same style as Hoot and Flush.
- Punch-Clock Villain: Jimmy Lee Bayliss, Drake McBride's Dragon. He gets seduced into illegal action by the promise of the millions of dollars they stand to make, but when the scheme starts to unravel, he decides enough is enough, surrenders to the law and agrees to turn state's evidence on his boss.
- Reasonable Authority Figure: The headmaster is a timid Slave to PR who doesn't fully understand most of the heroes, but he is open-minded about plot developments coming his way, has his limits about how much he'll kowtow to wealthy parents, provides the kids a relatively good learning environment, and does what he can to find Mrs. Starch.
- Recurring Character: Twilly Spree reappears from Hiaasen's adult novels Sick Puppy and Skinny Dip.
- Shout-Out: To Edward Abbey's novel The Monkey Wrench Gang. In interviews, Carl Hiaasen relates that, since several of his novels' characters are ecoterrorists, his friends assumed he'd read Abbey's work, but in fact he didn't until the 2000s. Once he did, however, he thoroughly enjoyed the novels, and drops several references to them in Flush, Scat, Squeeze Me, and Fever Beach.
- Sure, Let's Go with That: Jimmy Lee Bayliss is planning to pose as a septic tank inspector to plant evidence and frame Duane Scrod Jr. for an arson that Bayliss committed. When he knocks on the door, Duane Sr. asks if he's there about unpaid taxes. Deciding that this is a better cover story, he says that he is. This gets him physically assaulted, as there's no lost love between Duane Sr. and the IRS.
- Wise Beyond Their Years: It's a recurring theme in Hiaasen's young adult novels that his child characters are often clearer thinkers and better at advance planning than their parents.
- When Nick's father says his National Guard unit is being deployed to Iraq, Nick Googles the conflict and is angry that none of the "grown-ups" in the government can seem to explain why his father is being sent into battle: there is no evidence of the weapons of mass destruction the Iraqis were supposed to have, and the people his father is being sent to fight are supposedly the same people the American forces are being sent to help.
- Nick, Marta, and Duane, Jr. come up with their own plan to save the panther, with Twilly and Mrs. Starch's help.