Number 9 of 2008 is The Island of the Sequined Love Nun by Christopher Moore. You got to hand it to Moore, he comes up with the greatest titles.

The other thing you have to give to Moore is that, despite writing really funny books, he also manages to imbibe them with some rather dark moments that don't manage to completely wreck the tone of the book, but rather contribute to the overall sense of zany. And Moore's books are zany. They're zany but strangely plausible. The man's brilliant.

In this book we meet Tucker Chase, 'geek in a cool guy's body'. Chase seems to be a bit of a loser, a womanizing drunkard who's background story sounds strangely like Hamlet's (but without the whole Danish royalty thing); a good looking guy who seems to just float through life. When we meet Tuck, he's romancing a girl in an airport bar. Tucker's managed to find a gig as a private pilot for the head honcho of a cosmetics company (Mary Jean a thinly veiled Mary Kay), but within the first chapter, he completely blows this as he takes the girl for a tryst on the company Learjet, crashes it and gravely injures his man parts in the process. Mary Jean, not wanting to deal with the negative press Tucker has so kindly provided for her, 'disappears' Tucker to a tiny island in Micronesia, where he will now be a pilot for a Methodist missionary, flying medical supplies to and from Japan.

So Tucker, after surviving a typhoon in a row boat with only a (talking) fruitbat and the last navigator, a transvestite named Kimi, finds himself on his new home, a tiny island called Alualu; home to Dr. Sebastian Curtis and his wife Beth, a bunch of ninjas and the island's idingenous folks, the Shark People.

The Shark People are a little primitive, living on a rather sequestered island, but the Western World forcibly forced itself on them during WWII, when the Japanese built a small outpost and airfield on the island, and then the Americans took it from them. Due to these experiences, the Shark People have become what's called a 'cargo cult', the worship the American airman (a flyboy named Vincent) as a god who delivered them from the Japanese, and who gives them treasures from the Sky Priestess (Vincent's plane).

But it doesn't take long for Tucker to see that all is not right on AlauAlau. He is paid an exhorberant amount of money to take Beth Curtis to Japan where she drops off a small cooler and then heads right back. And when Tucker sees Beth's performance as the Sky Priestess (the Sequined Love Nun of the title), where she 'chooses' one of the Shark People, well, Tucker knows he has to figure out what's going on. Of course, this urge to know also stems from the fact that he's not allowed to drink and he's bored.

But somehow, Tucker knows that the Shark People are being exploited, he's just not sure how. He and his navigator Kimi befriend the Shark People, and he soon discovers just how badly the Curtis' are exploiting the Shark People, they're harvesting organs from them and selling them in Japan. Something awakes in the normally selfish, sodden and pitiful Tucker, and he realizes that he must help these people.

And help them he does. In an extremely over the top ending (which is something Moore does so very, very well), Tucker steals a 747 (no, he doesn't hijack it, there's an important distinction) and relocates the entire tribe of Shark People. It's all terribly satisfying.

Tucker Chase is a great character in the mold of 'pretty normal guy that has all sorts of weird shit happen to him and still manages to come out all right'. His exploits are fun because they are so bizarre and you really can't help but wonder how he's going to get out of it. True he's a pilot, but that really is the only remarkable skill about Tucker Chase. He's not a spy, he's not a ninja, and other than his ability to get into trouble, he's pretty unremarkable. But still, by the end of the book, he has grown as a character. Not hugely so, but just enough.

It's a fun book, like all Moore's books, complete with good lines, laugh out loud sections and improbable action scenes. They're always a good read.