The Riptide Ultra-Glide

December 17, 2012
Bestseller Dorsey serves up his usual mix of mayhem and mirth in his 16th Serge Storms thriller (after 2012’s Pineapple Grenade). As Serge—accompanied by his stoner companion, Coleman, who acts as straight man and one-man audience for Serge’s frequently baffling behavior—travels through Florida, he spouts weird bits of state history and dishes out inventive and unusual punishments to annoying miscreants. In particular, Serge, who aims for his own reality show (“You have to fake a lot of stuff”), deals with a beach bully, a rip-off artist preying on the elderly, incompetent doctors, shyster lawyers, pain clinics, and a budding turf battle between the Kentucky mafia and Mexican drug lords. Meanwhile, laid-off Wisconsin school teachers Barbara and Patrick McDougall embark on a Florida vacation that they will regret. Serge, the McDougalls, and the warring traffickers collide on a course that proves often hilarious and sometimes fatal. 10-city author tour. Agent: Nat Sobel, Sobel Weber.

January 15, 2013
Still thinking globally, but now acting locally, Serge Storms (Pineapple Grenade, 2012, etc.) turns his admittedly limited attention to the section of U.S. Highway 1 that goes from Fort Lauderdale to the Keys. Often confused by ill-informed tourists with Highway A1A, which actually does run along the ocean, U.S. 1 is home to gas stations, strip malls and seedy hotels. Perfect spot, thinks Serge, to film a reality show. So he packs his wingman Coleman into a '72 Corvette Stingray and heads down to Florida City, stopping at iconic spots like the Last Chance Saloon to film staged dust-ups with his spaced-out pal. Unfortunately, his foray into reality TV is constantly interrupted by, well, reality. A car chase ends abruptly in Lake Surprise. Crowds of awestruck stoners accost Coleman after he appears on the cover of High Tides. Eventually, Serge and Coleman get caught in the crossfire between drug kingpin Gaspar Arroyo, who runs a chain of shady pain clinics that specialize in dispensing OxyContin, and Catfish Stump, who moves the drugs from Lexington to Ocala in shipments of horse blankets. Also in the cross hairs are Patrick and Barbara McDougall, special educators vacationing in Florida after losing their jobs to Wisconsin's move to Right-to-Work. But their students' severe behavior problems are nothing compared to the mayhem they encounter when they book a stay at the Casablanca Hotel, right in the heart of U.S. 1. Filming and dodging bullets give Serge scant time for his other favorite hobby--vigilante justice--keeping the body count relatively low in Dorsey's stripped-down 16th.

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February 15, 2013
Serial killer and champion of all things Florida, Serge Storms is videotaping a reality TV show about his native state that he knows will beat those Jersey Shore mooks like a gong. He says this to his stoner sidekick, Coleman, as he tapes a pitched gun battle taking place on U.S. 1 between Ft. Lauderdale and Miami. Readers learn only later that the firefight was between gangs vying to control the supply of OxyContin to Kentucky. It's a dark beginning to Dorsey's latest (Pineapple Grenade, 2012) paean to the glories and charms of the Sunshine State. The author typically has Serge dispatching the state's most vile residents in imaginative ways, but in this one, the gangsters who die do so in a hail of MAC-10 bullets. Serge must make do with offing two oafs who violate the unwritten etiquette of the beach and the ATM queue. Fans of the series will find some belly laughs and unlikely sightseeing ideas, but the chilling portrait of Florida's pain-clinic pill mills may overwhelm the comedy for some readers.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)