Cadillac Beach (Serge Storms Series #6)

Everyone out of the water!

Serge A. Storms is back! The one-man crime spree hits no speed bumps as he swings through Tampa, Disney World, and parts south before settling down in Miami Beach to team up with a former sidekick and launch his long- overdue offbeat travel service.

It's a labor of love as Serge forces customers to confront the underbelly of the Sunshine State's past and present. Some clients get it; others run for their lives. No matter. Bullets fly, cars crash, bodies pile up, fireballs reach into the sky, local lore is recited. The tour continues.

But wait! There's more!

Our overachieving antihero has a full to-do list, and he multitasks during the tourist juggernaut to battle the Palermo crime family, mystery assassins, local police, the FBI, the CIA, Fidel Castro, and telemarketers.

Whew! That's plenty! . . . No, it's not! Serge is also out to solve a forty-year-old mystery involving the infamous "Murph the Surf" gem heist. Could this be what got his grand-father killed? So we jump into the time machine to meet his eccentric granddad, Sergio, who is running a small-time bookie operation in 1964 Miami Beach, a golden time and place popu-lated by the Beatles, Cassius Clay, James Bond, Jackie Gleason, and Flipper. . . .

Back to live action! Serge and his customers have become the hunted, hopscotching through a series of famous hotel rooms. But Serge tells them not to worry. He has a master plan, which is about to unfold in all of its insane glory . . . on Cadillac Beach!

And busting out of Chattahoochee State Hospital ... without his meds! The thrill-killing Floridaphile needs to get to the bottom of his bookie grandad's bizarre 1964 death — not to mention launch "Serge & Lenny's Florida Experience," the new Miami specialty tour venture he's cooked up with his best brain-dead druggie-buddy. It's all good. For Serge A. Storms, anyway. Not so much for anyone else.

Publishers Weekly

Certifiable nutcase Serge Storms and Lenny, his spacey marijuana-addicted sidekick, are back again in Dorsey's sixth screwball crime-spree novel (after The Stingray Shuffle), this time on the trail of a stash of missing gems. As the novel begins, Serge escapes from Chattahoochee, Florida's state psychiatric hospital, and heads for Miami, obsessed with the idea of clearing up the mystery surrounding his grandfather's alleged suicide, which is tied to the legendary dozen diamonds still missing after Murph the Surf's infamous 1964 jewel heist from the Museum of Natural History. Serge's ambitious crusade gets off to an ill-omened start when he awakens the interest of both the mob and the Feds after getting into a graveside altercation with Tony Marsicano, the mob boss who was alone at the deathbed of Rico Spagliosi, a deceased fence reputed to have a part in the jewel heist. In a typical display of off-the-wall buffoonery, Serge starts a specialty Miami tour service, and his first booking is a group of drunken salesmen who, out to play a practical joke on a colleague, mistakenly kidnap Tony, with dire results. Sporadically moving back and forth between time present and nostalgic flashbacks to Miami Beach in the 1960s, the novel chronicles the methodical murders of Serge's grandfather's old cronies as Serge tracks his grandfather's movements at the time of the infamous gem heist and the return of the most famous of the stolen stones. Studded with psychosocial observations and dopey gags, this latest episode of Florida's hottest helter-skelter, hallucinogenic freak show will delight legions of Dorsey fans. Agent, Nat Sobel. 5-city author tour. (Feb. 3) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Tim Dorsey was a reporter and editor for the Tampa Tribune from 1987 to 1999 and is the author of ten previous novels: Florida Roadkill, Hammerhead Ranch Motel, Orange Crush, Triggerfish Twist, The Stingray Shuffle, Cadillac Beach, Torpedo Juice, The Big Bamboo, Hurricane Punch, and Atomic Lobster. He lives in Tampa, Florida.