Hammerhead Ranch Motel (Serge Storms Series #2)
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Overview
There's a different schemer or slimeball behind every door: cocaine duckpins who have survived only by the dumbest fortune, hard-luck gigolos desperate to score, undercover cops busting undercover cops who are running sting operations on undercover cops. And just down the row, local historian and spree killer Serge A. Storms — who has stopped keeping up with his meds — is still looking for a briefcase stuffed with five million dollars...and is now capable of wreaking more havoc than hurricane Rolando-berto, the big wind gathering force offshore, just waiting for the opportunity to blow everything straight to hell.
Pack up your bags and head south to sunny Florida. Leave your rational mind at home and come well armed. There's a room with your number on it at the Hammerhead Ranch Motel.
Synopsis
The rabid fans of Florida Roadkill have been clamoring for answers: What happened to the hyperactive spree killer and fanatical Florida folklorist Serge A. Stormes and that $5 million in laundered drug cash? Now they can check into the sleazy Hammerhead Ranch Motel to find out.
One of the last old beach motels in the path of an advancing column of flistening new condominiums marching up the Gulf Coast shoreline, Hammerhead Ranch has a budget price and charming deterioration that make it a magnet for colorful clientele with seedy baggage. It's here where all the players ultimately converge—along with the elusive (some say cursed) Haliburton with the $5 million—for a final showdown during a killer hurricane. Add a dancing television weather dog, a shotgun-totin' grandma, two sex-and-drug-crazed coeds on the lam, a crew of storm-jumpers straight out of Airplane, and assorted other Floridian flotsam and the result is Dorsey's next great blockbuster.
About the Author:
Tim Dorsey is the Tampa Tribune's night editor and night news coordinator. He lives in Tampa, FL.
Florida Today
Close on the hyperactive heels of last year's Florida Roadkill, Tampa writer Tim Dorsey has unleashed an equally blistering sequel.
Editorials
From Barnes & Noble
Our ReviewThe Sun Goes to Your Head
Cocaine smuggling. Spree killing. Don Johnson impersonators. Ethically questionable taxidermy. Teenage sexaholic pothead fugitives. Welcome to Tim Dorsey’s Florida: a kind of criminal fantasyland where the drugs and liquor flow freely in equal measure, the homicides are always spectacular and hilarious, and the far-fetched, far-flung, and far-out coincidences are so much damn fun that you’ll be cursing your own boring reality by the time your stay is up. It is one hell of a place to visit; and if you’re planning to stick around, the Hammerhead Ranch Motel is the only game in town.
Hammerhead Ranch Motel is the title of Dorsey’s follow up to Florida Roadkill, the book that introduced us to Serge A. Storm, probably the most loveable sociopath fiction has ever known. It’s also the name of the beachside establishment on the Gulf Coast outside of Tampa that serves as the eye of this remarkably over-the-top hurricane of a novel. Serge has a room there; he’s camped out as he searches for the five million dollars in stolen drug money that disappeared at the end of Florida Roadkill. All of Tampa’s criminal community is looking, too, and God save the poor fool who winds up getting into the mix. Many do. The action, needless to say, is relentless.
At first it almost seems that Dorsey is too caught up in his own ability to write amusing little vignettes populated by colorful wackos, as in the beginning of the book when we’re introduced to one after another of his crazies in a series of bizarre, unconnected situations. It almost gets tiring. Then the tide turns, and Dorsey’s absurd-yet-ingenious plot machinations begin to reveal themselves. Half of the people he introduces us to he gleefully bumps off, and the survivors get dug deeper into the framework of the story. As the death toll mounts, with each murder or accident more imaginative and appalling than the last, the remaining players -- a truly wild cast of characters connected in a multitude of ways -- converge on Hammerhead Ranch, with a hurricane charging up the coast, for a denouement of mock-biblical proportions.
The novel does have its flaws. With so many characters, it’s often difficult to remember who’s who (is this the friend of the college student who fell through the roof of the aquarium into the alligator tank, or the guy who was misinformed about having one month to live and has decided to kill an obnoxious talk radio personality?), and not all of them ring true as authentic nutjobs. But most do, and we should forgive Dorsey for his, at times, overly enthusiastic method -- not just because he writes some of the funniest sex scenes ever composed in English, but because, goofy as it is, he has produced an astonishingly entertaining book.
--Olli Chanoff
Olli Chanoff is a freelance editor and writer who lives a bicoastal existence.