### From Publishers WeeklyIn the frenetic tradition of the film It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963), train buff and maniacal killer Serge A. Storms and his druggie pal, Lenny, chase a briefcase containing $5 million, which surfaced in Florida Roadkill (1999), in Dorsey's fifth over-the-top crime novel. Others trailing it include Russian hoodlums posing as Latinos, in the employ of the incompetent head of the world's only bankrupt drug cartel. The discombobulated mobsters end up on the NY-Miami supertrain, the Stingray Shuffle. The briefcase eventually lands in deserving hands-but will it remain there? The hurtling plot often gets sidetracked by Dorsey's self-indulgent set pieces and history lessons, leaving the reader out of breath, rather than breathless. Lenny says, "All my friends up north keep asking me, does the freak show ever take a break down there?" Not in Dorsey's Florida.Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.### FromIn his latest bizarre concoction, Dorsey picks up--sort of--various plot strands from his earlier books, including *Florida Roadkill* (1999), *Hammerhead Ranch Motel* (2000), and *Orange Crush* (2001). There's still the matter, you see, of the briefcase full of cash, and still unresolved are the stories of Serge Storms, the serial killer and history buff; Johnny Vegas, the startlingly handsome virgin; Jethro Maddox, the Hemingway look-alike; and Paul, the Passive-Aggressive Private Eye. Fans of Dorsey's magnificently off-kilter adventures will be thrilled to rejoin these characters and to meet a host of new ones, including Mr. Granda, the leader of a down-and-out drug cartel who is looking to buy a submarine, and Ralph Krunkleton, one of America's very worst novelists, whose novel *The Stingray Shuffle* features prominently in the goings-on. A brilliantly constructed romp that is part thriller, part farce, and entirely, gloriously, deliriously wacky. *David Pitt**Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved*
When serial-killing local Florida historian Serge A. Storms is off his meds, no one is safe — not Russian hoods, Jamaican mobsters, spoiled frat boys, women’s book clubs, drug dealers, bad Vegas-rejected local lounge acts — especially when $5 million in cash in a bugged suitcase is still racing up and down the Eastern Seaboard. But in the oddball circus known as the Sunshine State, little things like astronomical body counts tend to get lost in the shuffle.
THE STINGRAY SHUFFLE
TIM DORSEY
The fifth book in the Serge Storms series
Copyright © 2003 by Tim Dorsey
The only reason for time is so
that everything doesn’t happen at once.
— ALBERT EINSTEIN
Either he’s dead or my watch has stopped.
— GROUCHO MARX
PROLOGUE
Uh-oh. Lenny slipped me LSD.
That can be the only explanation.
It’s been nonstop hallucinations. Which normally I don’t mind, but you wouldn’t believe how it complicates trying to cross U.S. 1 against heavy traffic. I must have stepped off the curb and headed back about fifty times now. I think I’m in the Florida Keys.
I keep slapping the side of my head to make the visions stop, but it only changes the picture, like a slide projector.
Slap!
Carjackings, exploitation of the elderly, cigarette boats running from the Coast Guard, melanoma, tar balls, deed restrictions, beefy mosquitoes that crack windshields, Colombian shoot-outs, Cuban boycotts, Mexican standoffs, rampant-growth speculators, offshore-drilling lobbyists, cheap rum, cheaper motels, crack vials, condoms, mouse ears, William Kennedy Smith, Phillip Michael Thomas, chicken wing restaurants featuring women’s breasts…
Slap!
Shark attacks in two feet of water, barracuda jumping into boats and biting people, alligators roaming backyards and eating poodles named Muffins, college boys named Bo funneling beers on the beach and trampling sand castles and making children cry, broken-down cruise ships with decks full of irritable people from Michigan in puffy orange life preservers, the lottery won by a pool of 23 office workers who quit their jobs to become down-and-out junkies, trained seals playing
Slap!
There. The hallucinations have stopped. I’m in the dark, now. I’m weightless, too. That’s much better.
Whoops. Spoke too soon. The weightlessness is giving way. I’m starting to drop. Faster and faster. Free-falling toward a pinpoint of light. The light grows bigger, spinning off bright curved red swirls as I hurtle down this spiral chute like some hokey special effect from
