No Sunscreen for the Dead

November 15, 2018
Florida's biggest--and craziest--fan discovers the Sunshine State's greatest natural resource: old folks.A life well-lived deserves a happy ending. And if that ending starts midlife, so much the better, figures Serge A. Storms (The Pope of Palm Beach, 2018, etc.). So he packs his sidekick, Coleman, who, let's face it, is too stoned to put up much of a fight, into his banana yellow Ford Falcon and heads for the Villages, that sprawling retirement complex northwest of Orlando, which, Serge claims, has "the highest STD rate in all of Florida." From there, it's on to Sarasota, cultural mecca for Florida's retirees, followed by Pinecraft Park, where the Amish go to spend their golden years, until finally Serge and Coleman discover Boca Shores, a manufactured-homes community for the 55-plus crowd. Eureka! Pretty soon, Serge is spending his retirement doing pretty much what he did for a living: running tours of Florida's little-known historical gems and finding increasingly complicated ways to kill those who prey upon the innocent. Since crooked businessmen just love selling massive humidifiers and industrial-sized kitchen fittings to seniors in trailer parks, Boca Shores offers an ample supply of preyed-upon innocents. But with a little coaxing, those same seniors also love to party like it's 1969--which, to be fair, is when they came of age. It looks as if retirement may turn into a steady diet of senior-style sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll for Serge and Coleman, until a suspicious string of geriatric murder-suicides catches the attention of the FBI.All Dorsey mayhem is vintage Dorsey mayhem, but Florida's retirement scene provides the perfect backdrop for this latest round of lunacy.

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November 1, 2018
In their latest outing, cheerful Florida psychopath Serge Storms and his permanently stoned sidekick Coleman come to the aid of the residents of a retirement community. Meting out his special brand of justice, Serge takes care of sleazy salespeople who take advantage of the elderly retirees, resolves a dispute between the residents and the community's operator, and generally becomes the life of the party. But events have been set in motion of which Serge is completely unaware?events that will soon impact his life in a rather pyrotechnic manner. Dorsey's novels are unfailingly entertaining: his characters are meticulously described but slightly larger than life; his dialogue is delightfully offbeat; and Serge is, hands down, the most smoothly charming, irrepressibly goofy, joyfully out-of-his-mind series lead in contemporary mystery fiction. There's no one quite like Serge Storms, and there's no one who writes quite like Tim Dorsey. Don't miss this one, and be sure to catch up on the entire series, if you're not already up to date.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)