Tiger Shrimp Tango
Tim Dorsey
Serge Storms #17
William Morrow 2014
Tiger Shrimp Tango opens with toilet lids being tossed out of the windows of a high rise hotel and naked people rushing out of said hotel covered in fire extinguisher fluid. This is where Serge Storm says “ In Florida, you just have to filter out the background weirdness. When it comes to comic mystery novels set in Florida, no one does it better than Tim Dorsey. Not Carl Hiaasen (although he comes close at times), not Laurence Shames, not Victor Gishler, not anybody. Kindle: Tiger Shrimp Tango: A Novel (Serge Storms series Book 17)
This is because Serge Storms is a psychopath whose imagination for killing those he feels did wrong has absolutely no limit. In Tiger Shrimp Tango, the seventeenth Serge Storms mystery one way Storm dispatches a bad guy is to make him into a lifesize Mentos and Coke experiment (YouTube Mentos and Coke if you want to see something spectacular and then imagine a human being in the bottle).
In Tiger Shrimp Tango Serge Storms is out to unite Republicans and Democrats into one party. He is also out get even with the grifters and scam artists that prey on the weak. He is in luck because if there is one thing Florida does not lack is scam artists. He has even better luck because he happens upon an organized squad of fraudsters so he has plenty of picking before he gets to the man at the top.
A Tim Dorsey comic thriller is basically popcorn for the brain. Finding rhyme or reason in a Dorsey mystery is as hard as diagnosing what exactly is wrong with Serge Storms. It is easier to just go along for the ride as Storm and his sidekick, the perpetually stoned Coleman, wreak havoc in Florida while trying to do good.
Tiger Shrimp Tango is not laugh out loud funny but it sure is a lot of surreal, over the top fun.
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