Florida Roadkill
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Image:Roadkillpaperback.jpg Florida Roadkill is the first book in the unnamed series of books by Tim Dorsey which were centered on his character Serge Storms. It was published in 1999 by William Morrow and Company, an imprint of HarperCollins.
Note that the although Triggerfish Twist was written years later, the events of Twist take place at some unspecified point in the middle of those in Florida Roadkill (as Dorsey's web site puts it, Tim didn't know what he was doing and killed too many people he later decided he needed).
Roadkill is set in 1997, which may be due to the 1997 World Series taking place there and then. In between the beginning and the end of the book, Serge Storms, meet up with Sharon Rhodes and Seymore "Coleman" Bunsen, who are his travelling companions until he gets annoyed with Sharon and kills her by spraying Fix-A-Flat into her lungs, choking her to death. He and Coleman continue on for a while, but Coleman is later killed and Serge faces what turns out to be not quite certain death.
The book has two subplots, which at first have little to do with either Serge's adventures or each other. Eventually, however, all of the subplots tie in with the main plot.
The first is a pair of buddies who are travelling off for the annual unsuccessful fishing trip. They spend a great deal of time reminicing, and their stories lend an odd thoughtfulness on to Dorsey's triggerhappy writing style, a thoughtfulness which would apparently be shelved later on, until Orange Crush.
The second, slightly more comic, subplot deals with three bikeless bikers — Stinky, Ringworm and Cheese-Dick — who have been rejected from every biker group they have met yet, and are on the down and down. The find an odd sort of niche as bodyguards in a retirement community, but are ultimately thrown out, at gunpoint, by the community staff who don't want them making the seniors happy. They spend the rest of the time on a loaned yacht, sailing around, until they meet up with a deranged pervert, who kills two of them (Cheese-Dick having previously met his end when accidentally shot with a flare gun).
A number of minor characters (such as Bradley Xeno, the boat captain, and McJagger the retirement community operator) make minor appearances in the following book, Hammerhead Ranch Motel.