Scat by Carl Hiaasen

Scat by Carl Hiaasen is about Nick, a freshman at Truman, a fancy private school. He and his friend, Marta, are in biology class together with the worst teacher of all time, Mrs. Starch. She is rude, mean, strict, and worst of all, she makes fun of the students. Mrs. Starch picked on the wrong student one day (Duane Scrod Jr., otherwise known as Smoke). He bit her pencil in half and ate it - lead and all! The following day, the class went on a field trip to the Black Vine Swamp, near their Florida home. Smoke didn't show up for school that day. Soon after the groups of kids marched into the swamp, they smelled smoke and heard Mrs. Starch's blowhorn, signaling danger and for everyone to return to the bus. One student left her asthma inhaler in the swamp, so Mrs. Starch went back to find it. That was the last time anyone saw her. Some strange things began happening after that... Libby Marshall's inhaler mysteriously showed up on her back porch, a letter arrived at Truman stating that Mrs. Starch needed to take a leave of absence for a "family emergency", and Smoke came back to school wearing clean clothes and toting his homework. Nick and Marta decided it was their duty to figure out exactly what happened in the swamp and where their teacher actually went.

I really liked this book. Carl Hiaasen always writes about Florida, and he always writes about saving the environment. In Hoot, he wrote about saving some burrowing owls and their habitat from a pancake house development, in Flush, he wrote about a shifty casino boat owner dumping human waste into the Florida ocean waters, and in Scat he wrote about saving the endangered Florida panther and the Everglades. I always like reading about the ingenious ways his characters find to solve the mystery and defeat the "bad guy". This book, like Hoot and Flush, was funny, touching, and had a positive message about preserving our environment.