Construction manager Curly Branitt receives pressure from Mother Paula’s corporate vice president Chuck Muckle to solve the problem ahead of the upcoming ground-breaking ceremony, where Kimberly Lou Dixon, the woman who plays Mother Paula on TV, will officiate. The vandalism delays construction of the restaurant. He and his mother, Beatrice’s stepmother, do not get along, and Beatrice tries to protect him. Beatrice says the boy is her stepbrother, who keeps running away from home. Beatrice appears, riding Roy’s bike, and gives him a ride to the boy’s second hideout, which is in a junkyard. Roy’s bike gets stolen, and he must walk home in a pouring rainstorm. Roy rides back the next day with a pair of running shoes for the boy. He finds the boy’s camp hidden deep in the undergrowth.
Roy bikes to the golf course and continues his search for the running boy. Roy confronts Beatrice and tells her that, if she has a complaint with him, she can simply talk to him about it. Officer David Delinko, watching the site from his squad car, falls asleep and wakes to find his windows spray-painted black.
The police hear about it from the city council, and officers begin hourly patrols at the lot. The vandals also let the air out of a truck’s tires and put alligators into the site’s portable toilets. Vandals keep pulling out the survey stakes at a vacant lot where a future Mother Paula’s pancake restaurant will be built atop nests of burrowing owls. At school, a tall, blond soccer jock named Beatrice Leep collars Roy and warns him to stay away from the running boy. He chases after the boy, who leads him across a golf course, where Roy gets hit by a golf ball. A few days later, Roy again sees the boy. At the next stop, the boy continues running and heads off through the town. Riding the bus to school in the southern Florida town of Coconut Cove, new student Roy Eberhardt sees a boy running barefoot alongside the bus. Hoot was reprinted in 2020 the ebook version of that edition is the basis for this study guide. Hiaasen’s stories tend to focus on environmental problems and the political corruption that makes those problems worse. Twenty of his books have made bestseller lists. He has written nearly three dozen books, including six non-fiction works and six novels for young readers. Author Hiaasen is an award-winning journalist and columnist for the Miami Herald.
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