Hammerhead Ranch Motel

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What the reviews are saying ...
"With this followup to Florida Roadkill, Dorsey places himself in the ranks of Laurence Shames and Carl Hiaasen as a writer of hilarious, violent farces set in Florida."
- Publisher's Weekly, July 31, 2000

"There ought to be a law: If it's summer, we get a new Tim Dorsey novel. . . . With writers as wild and wonderful as Dorsey to represent us, even hurricane season doesn't seem so bad.."
- Miami Herald, July 16, 2000

"Another raucous roadshow in the spirit of Florida Roadkill."
- New York Times, Aug. 6, 2000

"Close on the hyperactive heels of last year's Florida Roadkill, Tampa writer Tim Dorsey has unleashed an equally blistering sequel.
- Florida Today

"Fans of the fast-read, you have met your match. As for the rest of you, just don't wonder why everyone else is laughing."
- The Tampa Tribune, July 9, 2000

"Dorsey, the author of the hysterical romp Florida Roadkill, is back with a sequel that continues and amplifies the manic energy, wild characters and outrageous situations of the original. This outing follows the five million ill-gotten dollars last seen in the trunk of a Chrysler on its way to Tampa. Serge Storms, Florida history buff and psychopath, wants his loot back, but it proves elusive. The money passes through the hands of a con man, several incompetent thugs, and, finally, the owner of the Hammerhead Ranch Motel. Serge tracks each of them down, generally with homicidal results. In a narrative as complicated and interwoven as a Robert Altman film, the reader meets the irascible denizens of a luxury seniors’ condo complex, a passive-aggressive private investigator, and Johnny Vegas, the Accidental Virgin. It’s not stretching to claim that Dorsey does for the Florida demimonde of the 1990s what Damon Runyon did for the New York of the 1920s. Thankfully, he also leaves the ending open for a third adventure."
- Booklist, May 15, 2000

What the publisher is saying ...
British edition

Pack up your bags and head south to sunny Florida. Leave your rational mind at home and come well armed. There’s a room with your number on it at the ... Hammerhead Ranch Motel.

Tim Dorsey, author of the raucous, raw-edged, hilariously bent literary joy-ride, Florida Roadkill, now invites you back to his Sunshine State-not the tourist-mecca pensioner-paradise the Chamber of Commerce would have you visit, but an Eden verdant with lost drug money; a center of lunatic gravity drawing fugitives, gangsters, losers, sociopaths and psychos of every flavor and degree to its tropic environs. And they all congregate in one sleazy, rundown motel perched on the lip of the Gulf of Mexico, just a short spitting distance from St. Pete.

Every room in the Hammerhead Ranch is host to a different schemer or slimeball. The Diaz Boys - cocaine duckpins who have survived only by the dumbest of luck-are stuck there with ten thousand hot, zebra-striped beepers. It’s where Zargoza - ne Harvey Fiddlebottom - runs his bogus sweepstakes scam. Here undercover cops running sting operations on undercover cops are busted by undercover cops, runaway checkout girls turn into sex-crazed pot maniacs, and a virgin hardluck gigolo strikes out again.

And just down the row, the native, Serge A. Storms, is hiding out from the Florida “heat” - ("You go and do a little spree killing and they never let you forget it!") - and looking out for the silver briefcase stuffed with five million dollars that has become his raison d’etre ... along with the compulsive need to visit every site of local interest in his beloved home state. And since Serge has stopped keeping up with his medication, he is capable of wreaking more havoc than Rolando-berto - the big wind gathering force offshore, just waiting for the opportunity to blow everything straight to hell. Like Hiaasen on a razor juiced with Quentin Tarentino amphetamine, Tim Dorsey’s Hammerhead Ranch Motel is a rapid-fire, over-the-top mix of dancing Chihuahua’s dressed up to predict the weather, drugged out Don Johnson impersonators and rampaging Hemingways, hateful two-ton deejays and octogenarian enforcers. It is hilarious and deranged, but this is Florida, where a direct hit from a catastrophic hurricane is the least of your worries.