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Summary
Nuclear Jellyfish
Author Notes
Tim Dorsey was born in Indiana in 1961. He received a B.S. in transportation from Auburn University in 1983. From 1983 to 1987, he was a police and courts reporter for The Alabama Journal. He joined The Tampa Tribune in 1987 as a general assignment reporter. He also worked as a political reporter in the Tribune's Tallahassee bureau and a copy desk editor. From 1994 to 1999, he was the Tribune's night metro editor. He left the paper in August 1999 to become a full time writer. He is the author of the Serge Storms series.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Fasten your seatbelts: Serge A. Storms, Florida's manic tour and history guide as well as its most inventive and prolific serial killer, cruises at warp(ed) speed through bestseller Dorsey's 11th thriller (after Atomic Lobster). Serge's primary target is a tattooed thug called Jellyfish (behind his back) or Eel (to his face), whose gang rips off diamond couriers. But along the frantic way, Serge and his pal, the always-buzzed Coleman, remove a variety of societal pests, including skinheads beating a homeless man, auto repair shysters preying on tourists and bargain motels that don't deliver on their bargains. Serge's instruments of vengeance include garden hoses, pigs, aerosol sprays and lots of duct tape. Dorsey's inspired insanity certainly won't appeal to everyone, but Serge's antics give vicarious satisfaction to those who too often see misdeeds go unpunished. In short, Serge continues to pummel convention and evildoers with exuberant abandon and wit. 9-city author tour. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Hewing to the basic formula established in 10 previous novels, Dorsey has his irrepressible Florida-lover and psychopath Serge Storms off his meds and on the road in a two-tone 1971 AMC Javelin. Obsession, compulsion, odd bits of Florida trivia, dumb criminals, and inventive ways to execute dumb criminals ensue, from Jacksonville to Miami. (Serge finds inspiration for his novel executions at Home Depot.) Throw in a beautiful, dangerous stripper; Serge's drug-addled sidekick, Coleman; dumb but murderous jewel thieves; and Serge's longtime nemesis, Agent Mahoney (also off his meds and trying to protect Serge from a contract hit), and you have a plot that even Serge's beloved duct tape can't quite hold together. But the charm of Dorsey's novels has never really been about plot. It's in the belly laughs, the eccentric bits of local folklore, the manic energy, and the hothouse Florida madness Dorsey churns out so reliably.--Gaughan, Thomas Copyright 2008 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
With historical mysteries so thick on the ground, doesn't it sometimes feel like a horse race? ("Going into the backstretch, the Victorians are holding the lead, but the Medievalists are gaining, and heeeere comes the Age of Enlightenment!") Maybe that's why Frank Tallis has surged to the front of the field riding his dark horse, Vienna in the last days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Opening in the Hapsburg capital at the height of the social season, FATAL LIES (Random House, paper, $15) immediately transports us back to the sophisticated world Tallis captured in "A Death in Vienna" and "Vienna Blood." Dr. Max Liebermann (whose psychoanalytic methods give this series its peculiar fascination) and his friend Detective Inspector Oskar Rheinhardt are both at the Detectives' Ball when Rheinhardt is called away to investigate the death of a cadet at St. Florian's military academy. Despite his respect for science - including new theories of psychopathic sexuality that Liebermann is studying with Prof. Sigmund Freud - Rheinhardt isn't immune to the cultural prompts of his Germanic heritage, and his spooky carriage ride through the Vienna woods is like a scene from the Brothers Grimm. "There was something about a deep, dark wood that held unspeakable terrors for the Teutonic imagination," Tallis tells us. The same impulse will later grip Liebermann when he suspects the seductive woman he's romancing may be a witch. This alone could account for the deeper appeal of the series - the suggestion that during this transitional era, the equilibrium of both state and psyche will keep shifting between cool reason and dark romance. In this context, St. Florian's can be seen as something of a microcosm, an Old World institution buffeted by new ideas, some all the more dangerous for being imperfectly understood. Although the dead cadet appears to have succumbed to natural causes, his body shows obvious marks of abuse, causing Rheinhardt to take a closer look at the way foreign scholarship students - and indeed, all outsiders - are persecuted by the privileged classes at St. Florian's and beyond its gates. So, while it's always a delight to visit the ballrooms where Strauss is played and the opera house where Mahler is rehearsing and the coffeehouses where ideas are devoured mit Schlag, this smart series has far more to offer than decorative charm. Readers who like their mysteries with a little meat on the bone probably think first of Sara Paretsky and Denise Mina, who find sociological significance in every neighborhood crime. Val McDermid puts the same substantive thought into A DARKER DOMAIN (Harper/HarperCollins, $24.99), using a missing persons case to revisit the devastating 1984 coal miners' strike that tore apart a working-class Scottish community. The daughter of a miner long assumed to have deserted the union cause and fled to England now has a pressing need to locate her father. That near-impossible task falls to Detective Inspector Karen Pirie, who grew up in these parts and finds herself viewing the grim lives of the miners' families with a mixture of compassion and horror. McDermid writes with gruff eloquence about the worn-down residents of a region where "the men didn't easily take to women with an education" and the women found a variety of outlets for their bitterness. Had McDermid kept her focus, this story might have maintained its blunt impact. But by introducing a parallel plot, set in the same time frame and also having to do with a missing person, she loads the narrative with so much weight that it falls right into the pit she's dug for it. Sooner or later, every Inspector Salvo Montalbano adventure abandons the pretense of being a conventional police procedural and collapses into opera buffa. In Stephen Sartarelli's translation Of AUGUST HEAT (Penguin, paper, $14), Andrea Camilleri's endearing Sicilian detective has a perfectly legitimate mystery to solve. The body of a teenage girl has been found in the illegally constructed basement apartment of a seaside rental property, and Montalbano is already on the case - because he rented the house and found the body. But because everything that happens in Sicily seems tied to crooked deals, often in chummy collusion with the Mafia, the investigation is soon tied in knots. At which point, the excitable Montalbano resolves the case through the sheer force of his glorious temper. People who love the Marx Brothers don't usually go for the Three Stooges. Since the same assumption applies to comic mysteries, here's one from each end of the taste spectrum. Tim Dorsey's NUCLEAR JELLYFISH (Morrow/HarperCollins, $24.99), the latest entry in the saga of Serge Storms, is pure gonzo humor. Serge being Serge (meaning certifiable), sex, violence and hilarity ensue as he pinballs along the Florida highways, pursuing his dream of authenticating every bit of the state's anecdotal history. Dorsey devises plenty of Stoogelike antics for Serge, but he also offers clever parodies of the tourists, truckers and conventioneers who stumble into his manic hero's path. THE LOVE POTION MURDERS IN THE MUSEUM OF MAN (Zoland/Steerforth, paper, $14.95) is no less giddy, but in a dry, snide style. Uppity Wainscott University is caught on Alfred Alcorn's blade when two antagonistic academics are found on the floor of the genetics lab, victims of an industrial-strength aphrodisiac and done to death by sexual excess. The Marx Brothers would be very welcome at this quirky institution. The military academy in Frank Tallis's latest Viennese mystery is an Old World institution buffeted by new ideas.
Kirkus Review
Lovable sociopath Serge Storms (Atomic Lobster, 2007, etc.) goes high tech, spreading information over the Internet about Florida's gas, food and lodgings. After putting in some pro bono work dispatching a pair of skinheads for roughing up a guy living in a cardboard box underneath one of Jacksonville's seven bridges, Serge decides he needs a paying gig. So he folds his pal Coleman into his 1971 Javelin and heads for a local Internet Job Fair. Pretty soon, he's both a street checker for a GPS system and a motel evaluator for a discount-travel website. These new professions allow him to keep on doing what he loves best: driving all over Florida and checking out obscure tourist attractions, including the West Tavern, where Lynyrd Skynyrd got the inspiration for "Three Steps," and the Holiday Inn across from Silver Springs, where John Travolta goes for his Denny's fix. He crosses paths with a posse of peripatetic coin dealers, some of whom smuggle diamonds on the side, and a band of thugs who plot to steal the diamonds. And he picks up Story Long, a hitchhiking stripper who shares Serge's love of sex followed by Viewmaster shots. Naturally, he takes time now and then to knock off some of the bad guys, especially after they beat up Howard, a Florida memorabilia fan whose collection is rivaled only by Serge's. Less zany than usual, Serge's 11th, part travelogue, part bloodbath, is both as monotonous and as uncertain as that combination would suggest. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
The 11th installment of the Serge A. Storms saga finds Serge, manic serial killer and dedicated Florida history buff, driving the interstates and back roads of his home state seeking out little-known historic sites and meticulously blogging about his ramblings. Life is an adventure for Serge and his sidekick, Coleman, who stalk a diamond thief and his thugs. No longer the random thrill murderer of Florida Roadkill, Serge has morphed into a conscientious vigilante who stalks his prey when appropriate and plans precise executions in keeping with the victim's misdeeds. That he miscalculates and almost blows this one seriously shakes his confidence, especially since his nemesis, Agent Mahoney, is instrumental in the final resolution. Dorsey has penned another fun-filled killing spree in the same vein as his ten previous novels. His readers will certainly demand this title, and fans of that other lovable serial killer, Jeff Lindsay's Dexter, may also enjoy. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 10/15/08.]-Thomas L. Kilpatrick, formerly with Southern Illinois Univ. at Carbondale Lib. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Nuclear Jellyfish Chapter One Jacksonville Midnight. Two young men walked along the bank of the St. Johns River, sporting shaved heads, sleeveless T-shirts and bituminous eyes that proudly announced: minimum wage 4 life. They gripped baseball bats halfway up the barrels. "I hate fuckin' bums." "So where are they?" "Supposed to be a bunch of them right around here." "Just like fuckin' bums." There had been a light rain, and warm mist rose from the road. Work boots slapped across glistening tar and splashed through moonlit puddles. They approached the underpass of the Fuller Warren Bridge. "Where the hell are those damn bums?" "Hold up." "What is it?" "Over there." "Where?" "Shhhhh. Get your camcorder ready . . ." A two-tone 1971 AMC Javelin with split upholstery sat in darkness and trash beneath a downtown bridge over the St. Johns River. "Theories abound concerning the phenomenon of the nation's trash elite inexorably percolating down to Florida like industrial toxins reaching our aquifers . . ." A beer can popped. "You're doing it again." Serge wrote furiously in his notebook. "Doing what?" "Talking to yourself." "No I wasn't." More writing. ". . . This travel writer places his money on time-release scumbag DNA . . ." Coleman burped. "You always talk to yourself and then say you're not." "I am? Really? That's embarrassing." He leaned over his notebook. ". . . The scumbag genetic factor is like hereditary blood disease or male-pattern baldness. At progressive age milestones, a series of rusty, chain-link twists in the double helix trigger a sequence of social tumors: Buy a pit bull, buy an all-terrain vehicle, get a DUI, sponsor a series of blue-ribbon slapping matches with your wife in the middle of the street, discharge a gun indoors, fail to appear in court, discharge fireworks indoors, get a DUI, forget where you put your Oxycontin, crash your all-terrain vehicle into your pit bull, spend money to replace missing front teeth on large-mouth-bass mailbox, get stretchered away by ambulance for reasons you don't remember, appear on COPS for a DUI, run out the back door when warrants are served and, in a trademark spasm of late-stage dirtballism, move to Florida . . ." Serge finished the transcription and turned to a fresh page. There was a period of silence in the two-tone Javelin (orange and green) sitting under the Fuller Warren Bridge. Then, a crunching of wax paper. A soggy tuna sandwich appeared. A travel mug of cold coffee came off the dashboard. "Serge," said Coleman. "What did you mean before, 'We're on stakeout'? We're not police." "Common mistake everyone makes, like the Constitution's reserve clause for states' rights. Just because cops do it, doesn't mean we can't." Serge took a sip from the mug. "This is our new job." Coleman finished unwrapping the sandwich. "I thought our new job was visiting hotels to fill out checklists for that travel website." "And on every hotel listing, there's a section called 'local things to do.' " "I'm not sure the websites want to send their customers under bridges at night in dicey parts of town." "That's my offbeat niche: I give the ¬people what they want before they know they want it." "But your new boss specifically said no more offbeat reports." "Everyone does what their bosses ask, and that's precisely why you need to distinguish yourself from the herd." Serge killed the coffee. "I stun them into paralyzed respect with my withering insubordination. First impressions are important." "They usually call security." "Because I made an impression." Coleman checked one of his pants pockets, then another. He pulled out his hand and raised the twisted corner of a Baggie to his eyes. "Where'd it all go? Did mice chew through here? Oh well . . ." He bent over. "Thought you'd outgrown that." "What do you mean?" "Everyone now knows coke is fucked up. You had an excuse for a while, because our hypocritical government lost all credibility by lumping pot in with crack to court the weed-bigot vote. Meanwhile, congressmen crammed all orifices with huge wads of cash from tobacco and liquor lobbies. But who would have guessed they were actually right about that stupid white shit?" Coleman raised his head and sniffled. "I just do a little bump now and then so I can stay up and keep drinking beer." "For a second I thought you weren't being productive." Coleman's head suddenly snapped to the side. He pointed out Serge's window. "What was that?" Serge turned. "What?" "Something moved under the bridge." Serge returned to his notebook. "Nothing's there. You're hallucinating again." Coleman squinted a few more seconds, then shrugged. He stuck his tongue inside the empty bag and reached under the seat for another Schlitz. "We need to make some money." "That's what I'm doing now." Serge flipped a notebook page, stopped and tapped his chin with a pen. "I need travel-writing tunes." He reached for his iPod, synched it with an RF transmitter to the Javelin's radio and cranked the volume. " . . . Fly high, oh, Freebird, yeah! . . ." Coleman rewrapped his tuna sandwich. "You've been listening to Skynyrd all day." "We're in Jacksonville. I'm required to listen to Skynyrd." "Why? Skynyrd's from Alabama." Serge began punching the steering wheel like a speed bag. "Everyone thinks they're from Alabama! They're Floridians! Apocryphal motherfuckers . . ." "Okay, okay, they're from Florida." Coleman set a wax ball on the dashboard. "I don't know this stuff like you." Serge pointed at the ball. "You're messing up my horizon." "The sandwich is soggy." "Soggy's better." "Fuck that shit." "Your little chestnuts complete my life." "So Skynyrd's really from Florida?" "Too many of our state's native accomplishments are credited elsewhere. First Skynyrd and Alabama, then everyone thinks the Allman Brothers are from Georgia." "They're not?" "South Daytona Beach." Serge flipped down the sun visor and gazed up at a photo attached with rubber bands. "You sure keep looking at that picture a lot." "I think I'm in love for the first time in my life." Nuclear Jellyfish . Copyright © by Tim Dorsey. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. Excerpted from Nuclear Jellyfish by Tim Dorsey All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
