GATOR A-GO-GO

In his 12th time out, Serge A. Storms, the sociopath with a heart of gold, goes where the wild things are: Florida during Spring Break.

Whenever he’s off his meds, Serge is famously prone to urges. Now that he’s hit mid-middle age, it suddenly seems sensible to him to join the running of the boys and girls in their annual fertility rite. This is the year Panama City Beach gets to host Spring Break’s hormonal hordes, with Serge and his faithful sidekick Coleman as added headaches. Zonked-out Coleman has the kind of symbiotic relationship with Serge that assures their shared participation in nonstop brainless behavior. But hold everything—apparently there’s a social scientist’s side to the enterprise. “The history of Spring Breaks in Florida,” intones Serge to avid student Coleman, “can be divided into three distinct epochs.” And sites. In chronological order, these are: Fort Lauderdale, Daytona Beach and lucky Panama City, all three of which will serve Serge as research projects. But it’s not in the man to languish professorial. Soon enough he’s knee-deep in what an observant FBI agent regards as his signature predilection for “weird murders.” Bad guys bite the dust bizarrely and, as always, some deserving little guys find an advocate in Serge, the manic populist.

As in any Dorsey novel (Nuclear Jellyfish, 2009, etc.), the plot is irrelevant. It’s all about laughs, which fans will find in satisfactory supply, though newcomers maybe not so much.