Review by New York Times Review
TROUBLE COMES CALLING ?? the Louisiana bayou parish where James Lee Burke sets his idiosyncratic regional novels. In THE NEW IBERIA BLUES (Simon & Schuster, $27.99), a condemned murderer named Hugo Tillinger has pulled off a daring escape from a Texas prison and is now hiding somewhere in his old neighborhood. Another recent arrival, the Hollywood director Desmond Cormier, has returned to his humble native roots to make a movie, installing himself and his entourage in a swell house with a spectacular view of the bay. From that vantage, Dave Robicheaux, the broody sheriff's deputy who has stamped his forceful personality on this series, lays eyes on yet another visitor - a woman nailed to a large wooden cross that washes up from the bay. The dead woman, the daughter of a local minister, volunteered for the Innocence Project and was working to free Tillinger from prison. But while there seems to have been a real connection between the minister's daughter and the escaped prisoner, Burke must exert himself to fit those Hollywood types into his brutal byzantine plot. (I stopped counting after the 10 th violent death.) But does anyone really read Burke expecting a coherent narrative? We're hanging on for Robicheaux's pensées, like his meditation on the living spirits of the dead: "I don't believe that time is sequential. I believe the world belongs to the dead as well as the unborn." We're keeping an eye out for vivid characters like Bella Delahoussaye, a blues singer with intimate knowledge of Big Mama Thornton's mournful "Ball and Chain." Maybe most of all, we're waiting for those angry outbursts when Robicheaux lets it rip: "I don't think you get it," he tells one of the movie people. "Louisiana is America's answer to Guatemala. Our legal system is a joke. Our legislature is a mental asylum. How'd you like to spend a few days in our parish prison?" Only if there's a new James Lee Burke novel in the cell. "there was esoteric knowledge involved in being a burglar," Thomas Perry advises us in THE BURGLAR (Mysterious Press, $26). It takes considerable expertise to select the right house, break in without waking the dog and recognize what's worth stealing. Elle Stowell has been at this profession since she was 15, but this petite, lithe young pro isn't prepared to find three people - all naked and shot between the eyes - piled in a heap on the king-size bed in the master suite of the house in Bel-Air she's broken into. The protagonists of Perry's ingenious thrillers are usually skilled at devising schemes for getting out of awkward situations. Elle uses her wits to break into tight spots, like the headquarters of the shady security firm hunting her down for involving herself in the triple homicide. Elle performs tricky feats here, but her pieces de resistance are the elaborate strategies she engineers to break into that company's control center. If Perry is the king of obsessive strategists (and I so declare him), Elle is his pinup model. the thing is, Serge A. Storms is nuts; nonetheless, that doesn't stop Tim Dorsey's psycho hero from doing great deeds. While gripped in his never-ending quest to write an oral history of his beloved Florida, Serge manages to violently dispatch profiteers who menace the innocent and unwary. NO SUNSCREEN FOR THE DEAD (Morrow/HarperCollins, $26.99) finds Serge on a mission to rescue retirees from the hucksters who prey on them. "They have absolutely no soul," he rages, after viewing one gullible couple's junk-filled home. "They will sell and sell and sell until you either lose your house or call the cops." With Coleman, his perpetually stoned companion at his side, Serge storms into Boca Shores, a retirement community of nice people who need his help. After snuffing out an abusive caretaker, he's honored with a raucous pool party, a tribute he repays by treating everyone to a rollicking road trip we'd love to sign up for. AUGUST OCTAVIO snow is a big Detroit booster. In LIVES LAID AWAY (Soho Crime, $26.95), Stephen Mack Jones picks up his gung-ho protagonist where the author left him in his first novel, "August Snow" - cleaning up his beat-up neighborhood in Mexicantown. Using the millions awarded from his successful case against the Police Department, this ex-cop has already rescued his childhood home and is now renovating the other houses on his street. Snow thinks his old job is safely behind him - until a girl in a Marie Antoinette costume is tossed off the Ambassador Bridge. The victim is 19-year-old Isadora (Izzy) Rosalita del Torres, an undocumented worker who went missing in a government raid, and her battered body indicates she was being exploited by sex traffickers. Snow swings into action-hero mode and recruits a posse of friends and neighbors for a vigilante mission that dovetails with his crusade against ICE raids. Seeing Detroit through Snow's adoring eyes is sweet. But except for the bad guys, who go out in a blazing gun battle, the characters are too good to be true, from Snow's sainted godmother and a priest who operates an underground railroad to Snow himself, who could use a few flaws to make him human. Marilyn STASIO has covered crime fiction for the Book Review since 1988. Her column appears twice a month.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [January 31, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
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.--David Pitt Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Bestseller Dorsey's superior 22nd crime novel featuring vigilante serial killer Serge Storms (after 2018's The Pope of Palm Beach) takes Serge and his stoner pal, Coleman, to an area of Florida that Serge has dubbed the Retirement Coast, where they encounter several locals who have been ripped off by unscrupulous salesmen. Serge takes it upon himself to get the victims their money back, while satisfying his own bloodlust by disposing of the con men with creative Rube Goldbergian devices. Meanwhile, Benmont Pinch, an employee of Life-Armor, a security company that both protects and invades privacy through its collection and use of personal data, is troubled by a disturbing pattern in a client's request for a list of "adjoining Social Security entries with the same birthday" for people who are not twins. That pattern may connect with a series of murders of retirees, and whatever it is that panics high-ups at FBI headquarters in a cryptic prologue. Dorsey ties the two plot lines together logically, offering another successful blend of the funny and the fiendish. Agent: Nat Sobel, Sobel Weber. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Florida's biggestand craziestfan 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 1969which, 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. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
