Product Description

Local trivia buff Serge loves inflicting pain. Drug-addled Coleman, his partner in crime, loves cartoons. Hot stripper Sharon Rhodes loves cocaine, especially when purchased with righ dead men's money.

Then there's Sean and David, who love fishing--and helping turtles cross busy thoroughfares. Unfortunately, they're about to cross paths with a suitcase filled with $5 million in stolen money.

Serge wants the suitcase. Sharon wants the suitcase. Coleman wants more drugs...and the suitcase. A hitman wants Satan to reign supreme. A slimy, insurance-frauding dentist wants his fingers back. In the meantime, there's murder by gun, Space Shuttle, Barbie doll, and Levi's 501s. Welcome to Florida!

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #57182 in Books
• Published on: 2000-06-01
• Released on: 2000-05-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 384 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780380732333
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From Publishers Weekly
This dizzying road movie of a first novel follows a passel of comic con men (and one con woman) down and around the Florida coast. Their adventures involve deliciously caricatured characters along with delirious violence, not to mention pigeon-eating maniacs, cocaine, traffic jams, biker gangs, hot-tub accidents, mock-Satanic heavy metal bands, partially frozen crocodilians, the World Series and the space shuttle. Serge and Coleman are roommates, manic ne'er-do-wells trying to fashion a living from crime and adventure. Sexy Sharon Rhodes murders magnates for their life insurance. On the run after her last hit, she meets Serge and Coleman, and the trio start a crime spree. Former millionaire George Veale has just been released from prison when he absconds with a suitcase of drug money. The cash belongs to insurance CEO Charles Saffron, who hires sleazy private investigator Mo Grenadine to get it back. (Mo is also a corrupt right-wing state legislator and a gay-baiting talk radio host.) Serge and Coleman (themselves remotely connected to drug cartels) get wind of the suitcase and scheme for the cash. Sharon wants in on the caper, too, whether or not the two men planned it that way. Dorsey's cast of dangerous oddballs chase, rob, shoot and kill their way from Tampa to the Florida Keys and the Dry Tortugas, until their raucous evasion of law catches up with them. Dorsey is a newspaperman by trade (at the Tampa Tribune), and his sentence rhythm can be crisply journalistic: "Wilbur Putzenfus was losing hair on top and working the comb-over. No tan. No tone.... Spiro Agnew without the power." Floridian readers may laugh or wince as Dorsey skewers the state's foibles and stereotypes. But he can abandon his verbal dexterity and his social observation to get a quick laugh or a quick jolt of violence: as a result, his satire seems less serious than it might be. Admirers of Elmore Leonard and Carl Hiassen will note their influences here; as entertainment, this rollicking, over-the-top novel is a blast. Agent, Nat Sobel. (Aug.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
In this debut, lots of people are after a suitcase full of money that got dropped in the wrong car: two bad guys, one obsessed with Florida history (the setting is Miami) and another with cocaine; one lady, whos also a killer; and the good-guy lawyer. Dorsey is night news coordinator of the Tampa Tribune, so expect good detail.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Imagine the violence of Edna Buchanan married to the skewed worldview of Dave Barry; now you're ready to meet Tim Dorsey, whose dark yet wildly funny first novel recounts several months in the lives of about 15 losers who are lower on the criminal food chain than even an Elmore Leonard character. Take the insurance executive who has turned to money laundering to save his failing business after Hurricane Andrew; or the three thug wanna-bes who end up as vigilantes defending a community of senior citizens against their rapacious landlord; or take Serge and Coleman, who can only be described as Cheech and Chong with guns. What ties these characters together is the seventh game of the 1997 World Series in which the Florida Marlins defeated the Cleveland Indians in extra innings. Dorsey's delightful novel belongs in the hands of anyone who likes the mix of Florida setting and black humor in the work of Leonard, Carl Hiaasen, and Laurence Shames (see p.1485). George Needham

Customer Reviews

Laugh Out Loud Hilarious! I read it twice!
Tim Dorsey's "Florida Roadkill" is hands down, without a doubt, one of the funniest novels I've read in years! I was laughing by page two!

The narrative is fast-paced and top notch. The plot is devilishly multi-layered and engaging. Mr. Dorsey populates his delightfully demented Floridian world with the most whacked out collection of loonies ever assembled.

Serge A. Storms is a character that readers will remember for some time. Mentally unbalanced and a font of trivial pursuit-esque knowledge.

Coleman, Serge's sidekick, is a whack-a-loon of the highest caliber. There's a seen involving Coleman, an almost successful bank robbery and a poorly hidden dye-pack that had me laughing till my sides hurt. Clearly a scene that could easily be adapted for the big screen by the Farrelly brothers!

The supporting cast of nut-jobs really flesh this novel out! To name but only a few....Sharon Rhodes. Johnny Vegas. The Riders of Eternal Doom, Sunshine Chapter. Fred McJagger and his beleaguered residents of Vista Isles. Mo Grenadine. And let's not forget the world's worst drug cartel!

Throw into this mix a suitcase with $5 million in cash and you get a novel that's some bizarre emulsion of a Monty Python sketch, Clerks, Pulp Fiction and "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World"!

The inference that this novel is remiscent of Hiaasen is a very nice sentiment and well deserved. However, Tim Dorsey is a writer of his own unqiue style of prose and humor. I EAGERLY await "Hammerhead Ranch Motel"!

Dam* good and very funny...
To those who think Tim Dorsey isn't in the same league as Hiaasen, Shames or Leonard and the rest of the ilk....I think you need to seriously develop some taste. You want to talk about "borrowing" from Hiaasen? Then read "Big Trouble" by Dave Barry. As much as I love Hiaasen, and have read almost every one of his books, his approach thesedays is so extremely color-by-the-numbers, that you can see what's coming from about 20 miles away.

Dorsey stands on his own and he does it incredibly well. With nods of the head to Hiaasen and even Barry (they do a "cameo" in this book), this book is its own creation. It owes very little to the other authors. This book has many twists and turns, and it's fantastic to see how these characters get what's coming to them. There are many times that what is going on in the story is just laugh-out-loud funny. Contrary to some of the short-attention-span readers below, you DO care what happens to these characters. They DO come to life and make you feel as if you almost know them. Having lived in Tampa, as well as South Florida before, maybe this is a humor that is best appreciated by Florida folks. Maybe there's something that's lost in the translation on its way to other states (Virginia and Oregon, I'm looking in your direction.)

A word of "caution" I suppose is in order. Not to give away the ending of this book, but, it just ends. It ends with an old-fashioned radio program ending such as: "Will our hero escape the death trap?" or "What will become of?" Yes, no perfect-wrap-it-up-in-a-pretty-bow style "EPILOGUE" endings so famous with Hiaasen and ripped off by Barry and Shames. Perhaps some kudos are in order for creative marketing skills, I don't really know.

Having said that about the ending, the story continues and is picked back up in "Hammerhead Ranch Motel." So, my advice, buy both of these books to get the complete tale, or you will be just left wondering.

You want some Florida authors that make Hiaasen (again, even as much as I love him), Shames, Barry, and Dorsey, seem like school children? Look into James W. Hall and Randy Wayne White. They are truly gifted and epitomize literary skill. If overall wackiness is your genre, look further into anything by Christopher Moore.

Enjoy it for good writing, great humor, and a entertaining story. If you're constantly reading line by line, looking for things similar to other authors, get a life. You have far too much time on your hands if that's the case. If it is the case, think about this, someone (and I won't name names) said that all fiction is styled directly from "Tom Sawyer" and "Huckleberry Finn." Put that in your pseudo-intellectual pipe and smoke it.

Dorsey an emerging figure in slash-and-burn Florida fiction
Picture this scene: I'm riding in a Greyhound bus filled with various low-lifes (including myself) from Gainesville to Ft. Myers (both in Florida) with this book in hand, laughing out loud every 5 minutes or so. Ordinarily, this is not proper behavior on such a trip, where you should keep your mouth shut and your valuables firmly in grasp. Kudos to you, Mr. Dorsey, for your ability to express the insanity of Florida crime with such wit and candor. You are truly in league with Hiaasen and Leonard for great Florida crime fiction. I can't wait until the next book for the exploits of Serge, who is certainly in line for admission into the Crime Character Hall of Fame (next to Hiaasen's Skink).