Monday, January 21, 2008

Torpedo Juice by Tim Dorsey (2005)

(Found I had written up this description on paper for this book that I read last summer.) This would have been the perfect book to listen to while on a Florida vacation, especially one to the Keys. Though listless characters doing drugs is not my favorite scenario, I found myself breaking into a smile quite often. Serge heads down to the Florida Keys to get married, though he doesn't have a wife picked out yet. He hooks up with his old buddy Coleman (sounds like these two characters have been in previous books), a pretty worthless druggie, but he makes an entertaining side-kick for Serge. Serge finds mousy Molly working in the library and asks her to marry him on their first date. I couldn't understand how an intelligent woman like Molly could go for such a con artist as Serge, but maybe she was desperate. I can't complain about stereotyping librarians, as the other librarian is a beauty. Though Serge is a con-man, I have to admit he grew on me, The riffs on buying towels with his new wife and then their session with a marriage counselor I found hilarious.

I really loved the references to specific keys, the small Key deer, mangroves, Key West, etc. I should have had a map in from of me while listening to this. I remember my one vacation in the Keys back in 1984 - and there really was a lot of back and forth on Route 1 - the string that holds the pearls of keys together. I seem to recall mile markers, as you never knew which key came when, so for directions, people gave you mile markers.

The book is full of colorful characters, and since this is a thriller/mystery, there are drug pins, cops, mysterious sharpshooters, and murderers. The book is so lighthearted that you don't notice how many murders have occurred until the end.

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