Tim Dorsey - The Pope Of Palm Beach

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Great stuff

I loved The Pope Of Palm Beach. 

Although there are 20 previous books in this series, this is my first Tim Dorsey and it worked fine as a stand-alone novel.  Set in Florida, it's a very amusing farce featuring the manically curious and furious Serge Storms and his drug-addled sidekick, Coleman.  They are a brilliant pairing, with Serge venting his righteous rage on various scumbags who do things like dump polluting materials in nature reserves or price vital medicines out of the reach of those who need them out of personal greed.  They all meet dreadful but appropriate ends, a bit like a modern-day, secular version of Dante's Inferno.  There is also an historical story intercut with this, whose relevance we don't discover until the last quarter or so of the book, but which works very well and leads to a thrilling (and amusing) climax which kept me reading well after I should have stopped for the night.

It's excellently done.  You really do have to get the tone right if you're going to make gruesome killing funny, and Dorsey gets it perfectly.  He writes brilliantly, creating an excellent sense of place, and the balance of excitement and humour in the narrative seemed perfect to me.  He also skewers many of the idiocies of modern life and especially in the character of Darby Pope, makes some quite profound human statements below the witty surface.

I'm delighted to have been introduced to Tim Dorsey and I'll definitely be looking into more Serge and Coleman books.

(My thanks to Farrago Books for an ARC via NetGalley.)