The Riptide Ultra-Glide: A Novel (Serge Storms) by Tim Dorsey Edition: Hardcover Price: $16.46  Kindle Edition $12.74
What's up with Florida and Serge and Coleman?, January 23, 2013 This review is from: The Riptide Ultra-Glide: A Novel (Serge Storms) (Hardcover) The Riptide Ultra-Glide: A Novel (Serge Storms) by Tim Dorsey What should be on everyone's lips is not "What's up with Florida" but rather, what is up with this series. I have always loved this series for its irreverent look at life and death. Looking at life through Serge and Coleman's eyes has always been such a pleasure. These books have always reminded me of Carl Hiaasen's books but nuttier - a tad cruder. I have always loved them; but lately they seem to be more of a mish-mash of crime and history more than anything else and with "The Riptide Ultra -Glide" you don't even get a satisfactory ending. I really tried not read this with a tight butt attitude, but... This book is less about the usual ingenious killings of those that *might* need killing and the usual fish-out-of water vacationers, and more about unnecessary swearing, gratuitous drugs and a level pf vindictiveness that I don't remember from previous books. We have a drug war going on among other things, a war that is between the so-called Kentucky Mafia or the Hillbilly Mafia and the Mexicans. We have vacationers from Wisconsin, who are so naïve and sweet that you may just want to knock them upside their heads, and we have various stoners following Coleman around wanting his autograph. The vacationers, Pat and Barb, have just been laid off from the school they teach at and they feel they deserve a vacation before they go on to the next phase of their lives and the next job. They make reservations in a part of Florida that they have not researched and haven't been to since the husband Pat, was six years old, and they did no research on the motel they are staying at. The vacation deteriorates quite quickly. And, it just keeps on going down-hill fast to the point that you really need to suspend your disbelief to a point that you may feel uncomfortable with. What we do not have is very much of a story, which is somewhat normal for Tim's books. However, I have never seen anything in his repertoire as disjointed and slap-dash as this novel. The book really doesn't even get really interesting until you hit about 75% mark. Perhaps I have just grown out of my liking of overly wacky novels with characters that just burst from the pages, but I don't think so. *ARC supplied by publisher*