Literature / Serge Storms

aka: Florida Roadkill

Coleman: How do [ostriches] use those toes anyway?
Serge: In the case of human attack, first, they knock their prey down and pin the person on their back with one foot...
Coleman: Just happened.
Serge: Then they start raking their victim’s chest with the other foot...
The Asshole Victim screams in the distance.
Coleman: Put a check mark there ... What happened to your empathy thing?
Serge: Just because I was forced to mete out justice doesn’t mean I don’t feel his pain...
Coleman: There goes a liver.

Tim Dorsey (born January 25, 1961) is a Floridan author known for his series of 'comedic crime novels' mostly taking place in and around his home state. Dorsey loves Florida and all its weirdness, and it's on full display in his books.

The novels follow the story of Sociopathic Hero (or Anti-Hero, depending on your view) Serge A. Storms, a proud Floridian, history lover and incredibly inventive Serial Killer, along with his many companions. There are many recurring characters, and there's enough continuity that books will sometimes reference the events of previous books, but each novel is a stand-alone story, and can be read in any order without too much trouble.

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List of Serge A. Storms novels:

• Florida Roadkill (1999)
• Hammerhead Ranch Motel (2000)
• Orange Crush (2001)
• Triggerfish Twist (2002)
• The Stingray Shuffle (2003)
• Cadillac Beach (2004)
• Torpedo Juice (2005)
• The Big Bamboo (2006)
• Hurricane Punch (2007)
• Atomic Lobster (2008)
• Nuclear Jellyfish (2009)
• Gator A-Go-Go (2010)
• Electric Barracuda (2011)
• When Elves Attack (novella, 2011)
• Pineapple Grenade (2012)
• The Riptide Ultra-Glide (2013)
• Tiger Shrimp Tango (2014)
• Shark Skin Suite (2015)
• Coconut Cowboy (2016)
• Clownfish Blues (2017)
• The Pope of Palm Beach (2018)
• No Sunscreen for the Dead (2019)
• Naked Came the Florida Man (2020)
• Tropic of Stupid (2021)
• Mermaid Confidential (2022)
• The Maltese Iguana (2023)

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This book series contains examples of:

• 419 Scam: Serge runs into one during Pineapple Grenade, when he tracks down the one responsible and discovers them to be a nebbish college student he decides only shake them down for a thousand dollars rather than anything more lethal.
• Action Politician:
  • Downplayed with Governor Conrad, who has this reputation in Orange Crush, as he served in the National Guard during his tenure as lieutenant governor and saw combat in the Balkans. However, he is more of a bumbling Action Survivor during that engagement, which is shown in flashbacks. He does pull out his gun and stand between a death squad and a civilian family after all of his men are killed or wounded, but his hands are shaking, and he probably would have been gunned down without killing any of his opponents if not for the arrival of The Cavalry.
  • Also in Orange Crush, a group of government employees acting as the campaign staff of aspiring governor Grover Tatum get into a fight with several wrestlers. Most of them fare poorly, but a tax attorney and a group of state auditors do well enough that their opponents need reinforcements.
• Affably Evil:
  • Anti-Hero Serge himself constantly subjects anyone who upsets his sense of right and wrong to a Cruel and Unusual Death that may be drawn out over hours or days. He's also an earnest conversationalist who will go to great lengths to help his friends and anyone whose victimization rankles his sense of justice.
  • Acknowledged In-Universe with regards to Sly McGraw from Triggerfish Twist also known as the Courteous Crook who is extremely polite even in the middle of a hold up or hostage situation. When he crosses paths with Serge, the two have an even handed discussion about if the entire country is getting worse or if Florida is a unique case and Sly even admits that he and his brother's behavior is evidence that support's Serge's argument in favor of Florida being especially wild and unrly.
  • Professional killer Doug from Cadillac Beach spends much of the scene where he holds Serge at gunpoint chatting animatedly about his interest in acting and promising not to draw out the the execution.
  • Downplayed with Corrupt Corporate Executive Hunter Bleadoph from Electric Barracuda. He revels in his economy-wrecking misdeeds, cheats on his wife, and is rude to anyone he thinks is beneath him, but he's also quite laidback and frank during his two conversations with Serge (which may be why Serge gives him a relatively quick death).
  • Small-Town Tyrant Vernon from Coconut Cowboy is a jovial man who is genuinely welcoming to new resident Peter Pugliese for much of the book. It doesn't stop him from trying to scapegoat and murder Peter for Vernon and his clan's crimes (such as pumping environmentally unsound amounts of water and murdering someone who found out about it) once the need for a scapegoat arises, though.
  • Cinco from Mermaid Confidential carries out many brutal murders on behalf of a drug cartel whose leaders are left rattled by his degree of ruthlessness. He also gives those leaders an almost familial degree of loyalty and protectiveness, is honest and easygoing with people he cares about, and gets along well with honest civilians.
• AM/FM Characterization:
  • Serge's taste in music runs toward classical rock musicians like Jim Morrison, The Animals, and Lynyrd Skynyrd, as befitting his sense of nonstop nostalgia.
  • In Hammerhead Ranch Motel, City and Country happily dance to "Long Cool Woman in a Black Dress" by The Hollies, a rock and pop band from the same era as many of Serge’s favorite artists, but one that doesn't have an overlapping fanbase with many of them. This may reference how they can mingle with Serge without the same kind of hostility he had with his previous girlfriend, Sharon, but still have personality conflicts with him.
  • In The Stingray Shuffle, outgoing, assertive, and (generally) rational and logical Jamaican criminal Zigzag finds reggae artists like Jimmy Cliff relaxing while his more high-strung Russian associate can't quite get into it.
  • In Atomic Lobster, Serge is quite peeved when his companion Rachael, who lives for the hedonism of the moment, turns out to prefer the modern Pop Punk band Good Charlotte and turns off "House of the Rising Sun" to listen to one of their hits. Although he forgets his annoyance after she starts doing an erotic dance to the music.
  • As part of Bunny-Ears Lawyer stoner Ziggy Blades' Establishing Character Moment in Shark Skin Suite, his radio is blaring "Lawyers, Guns, and Money," a loud, angry song about living on the edge.
  • Kyle Lovitt from Naked Came the Florida Man is a Type I Eagleland kind of guy who proudly plays "This Land is Your Land" in the face of a Politically Incorrect Villain.
  • Maggie Crenshaw, who is briefly neighbors with Serge in Mermaid Confidential and The Maltese Iguana, fondly listens to jazz music by the Tijuana Brass and has a mellow, easygoing attitude that is reminiscent of their music.
  • Several of Serge's minor neighbors in Mermaid Confidential and The Maltese Iguana have started spending most of their time listening to The Allman Brothers and The Grateful Dead after they gained access to a large amount of medical marijuana and began spending most of their time stoned.
• Amoral Attorney: There are several throughout the series, but Shark Skin Suite has Serge's scheme to become a legal crusader taking on a firm stealing out mortgages from people.
  • Also in Shark Skin Suite, a former hookup of Serge's has become a lawyer herself... but is an honest crusading one fighting against the crooked banks ruining people over fake mortgage loans.
• Anti-Villain: Serge is a Serial Killer, and in some stories openly admits it. His good points are A) his victims tend to be jerkasses, B) his genuine love for his home state, and C) his determination to protect innocent lives.
• Anyone Can Die: Warning: If you ever show up in one of Dorsey's novels, you will die. Painfully, and in a highly imaginative manner.
• Apparently Powerless Puppet Master: The ending of Cadillac Beach reveals that the seemingly drunk and hapless salesmen who accidentally killed a mobster in a Deadly Prank and got dragged along with Serge's adventure are professional hitmen. They deliberately killed the mobster and manipulated Serge into taking them with him, hoping that he'd lead them to some valuable jewels his grandfather stole decades earlier.
• Artistic License – Biology: In Shark Skin Suite, Serge paralyzes a conman (who tricks parents into thinking that their teenaged children have been horribly injured in car accidents and that he won't call an ambulance in time to save their lives unless they wire him $10,000) and lets him get Eaten Alive by a python, but real-life pythons are known for constricting their prey to death before swallowing.
• Artistic License – History: In Tropic of Stupid, we see a flashback to one of Serge's ancestors being arrested by the police and calling them fascists. Except this event takes place right at the outbreak of the Spanish American war in 1898, and at the earliest, the Fasces of Revolutionary Action were founded in 1915, so the ancestor would be using a word that wouldn't actually mean anything. Given the general Shown Their Work approach this series has to history the best explanation is probably that since Serge directly invokes this flashback, Unreliable Narrator is at play.
• Artistic License – Religion: At one point Segre gets both a democrat and a republican campaign staffers to take truth serum, and then end up rejecting the idea of having Jesus Christ be their candidate but one of the reasons the Democratic staffer gives is that Jesus teachings of "render unto Ceaser" makes him question if Jessus would support shifting the tax burden to the rich. The problem is that this is pretty much the exact opposite of the passage's meaning. Its actual lesson is that you should be willing to pay your taxes to the government.
• Asshole Victim: Anyone suffering Serge's wrath - outside of the first novel - tends to be arrogant Jerkass pulling a serious Kick the Dog moment within Serge's radar. And this being Florida, there is no short supply of Asshole Victims for Serge to confront.
  • Orange Crush has the honor of presenting the biggest Jerkass Dorsey could think of: a corrupt land developer making billions off of shoddy suburban hellholes who intentionally pushes himself into becoming the biggest type of Jerkass in the world. A corrupt sports team owner.
• Auto Erotica: In Atomic Lobster, Serge and Rachael have sex in the backseat of his car at least twice within a day of meeting each other and then proceed to argue about whether to follow this up with doing drugs or driving to a nearby tourist definition.
• Awesome by Analysis:
  • In Coconut Cowboy, colege student Matt Pugliese finds a website Serge sets up that convinces him that Serge and his endless flow of trivia will be a boon for Matt's thesis about the decline of the American Dream. He looks at Serge's posts, calculates the next place Serge will likely go to talk about his current subject, and is waiting when Serge gets there. As a wanted fugitive (unknown to Matt), Serge is shocked that a civilian was able to predict his movements that way when the authorities couldn't.
  • Data-mining firm analyst Benmont Pinch from No Sunscreen for the Dead identifies a criminal who stole several DVDs (among other things) by checking rentals of the sequels to any of the stolen films. Benmont also notices how other clients seeking to find out Social Security information are up to no good based on the content of the information they want and compares the Social Security numbers those people are seeking with those of recent murder victims to confirm that the data is being used for some kind of target list.
• Bait-and-Switch: An early chapter in Pope of Palm Beach focuses on a a drug smuggling near emotionless killer leading a small gang who most readers would expect to go onto be one of the main villains of the story. Before the chapter is over he's been successfully framed by his own accountant who takes over the gang and goes onto be the main villain.
  • In Maltese Iguana at one point Serge breaks into a diatribe about how he can't stand someone spending a great deal of time idling in their parking spot instead of leaving it for someone else to use, which might suggest the person in question will soon be his next victim. Instead however he winds up targeting a guy who is price gouging people for toilet paper in response to a pandemic
• Bait-and-Switch Tyrant: In Shark Skin Suite, Judge Kennesaw Montgomery Boone is introduced as a rabidly pro-corporate judge and the last person Crusading Lawyers Brook and Shelby want presiding over their case against corrupt bankers. However, their brilliance, the blatant stupidity and criminality of the other side, and some of Serge's trivia gradually win Boone over into an extremely Reasonable Authority Figure who enjoys watching the collapse of the corrupt defense team.
• Bare Midriffs Are Feminine: Stripper and amateur porn star Rachael from Atomic Lobster is more sensual than Serge's usual Hot Librarian Girl of the Week and her wardrobe includes a lot of tops that show off her stomach, including baby tee shirt, a skimpy halter top, and a sports bra.
• Bavarian Fire Drill:
  • In The Triggerfish Twist, Serge shows up at a college, gives an invigorating and detailed lecture about the history of Florida, and is invited to be the next commencement speaker before the Dean figures out that he doesn't work there.
  • Likewise in Hurricane Punch he's able to steal an ATM machine in broad daylight, via the advanced technique of... having a clipboard and asking the clerk manning the store in question to sign for it while pretending to be doing some kind of inspection.
• Because You Were Nice to Me: In the last act of Coconut Cowboy, Fall Guy Peter is discretely helped by a Butt-Monkey member of a Small-Town Tyrant clan due to being the only person to call the local youth by his real name and tell him he's smart instead of calling him "Slower" (referring to his supposed unintelligence). Peter saving his life during a cave-in also helps.
• Behind Every Great Man: In Orange Crush the governor's political opponent is being driven by his hyper ambitious fiancée.
• Berserk Button: Woe to any Jerkass who breaks or ruins a piece of Florida history while Serge is watching.
• Black Comedy: Much of the humor comes from how absurd and over-the-top Serge's crimes are, as well as how absurd and over-the-top he is.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: Oh, Serge... Murder? Fine, if it's for a good reason. And he just so happens to think that destroying a piece of Florida history is a really good reason.
• Bratty Teenage Daughter: Debbie Davenport is 16 during The Triggerfish Twist and is constantly storming out of the house to spend time with her scuzzy boyfriend while refusing to acknowledge her parents.
  • A decade and change down the line in When Elves Attack her younger sister Nicole is now fifteen and likewise is going through a goth phase while dating an older scuzzy boyfriend.
• Breaking the Fourth Wall: The Author's and Publication Notes at the end of each novel go into incredibly bizarre descriptions, and in one book Serge and Coleman try to sneak their way through the Author's Notes to avoid getting arrested in the novel proper.
• Butt-Monkey: Johnny Vegas suffers improbable cock-blocking misfortunes every time he appears.
• Casanova Wannabe: Johnny Vegas, who is handsome, wealthy, fun to be with... and cursed never to lose his virginity. He is always just about to when circumstances (often caused by Serge) intervene.
• Cast as a Mask: A subdued version of this is present in the Audiobook of Atomic Lobster. When we see Agent Foxtrot being debriefed after their final mission, Foxtrot speaks in a flat accentless manner to prevent the listener from discovering their identity early.
• Characterization Marches On: The characters do age between the stories. Serge is well into his late-40s after Hurricane Punch, and recurring characters City and Country have gone from innocent college-age girls from their introduction to jaded 20something women in the more recent novels.
  • Detective Mahoney is a fairly normal police officer when we chronologically first meet him in Triggerfish Twist, but before long he winds up locked up in an asylum thanks to spending too much time trying to figure out Serge. This eventually gives way to him being sane enough for duty again, but now is prone to speaking and acting like a police officer or private eye from a Film Noir piece making him just as weird as Serge, but in a distinctly different way.
  • The two older Davenport kids from Triggerfish Twist are in college by Gator A-Go-Go.
• Chekhov's Gun: Early in Shark-Skin Suite, Serge says he'd like to get a T-shirt gun because of the effect it has on the onlooking crowd. During the climax, he pulls one out and uses it to good effect.
• Christmas Episode: When Elves Attack, covering Thanksgiving through Christmas.
• Continuity Nod: In Maltese Iguana Serge points out that that people price gouge in response to a pandemic are even worse than those who price gouge during a hurricane. Back during Hurricane Punch Serge gave a bonus round to a hurricane price gouger.
• Cooked to Death: In The Stingray Shuffle, a pair of frat boys who like to beat up bums suffer perhaps the most horrifying deaths in the series when Serge ties them across ultareflective sun blankets on top of a roof during the middle of a sunny summer and then sprinkles salt over them. Their bodies have shriveled down to seventy pounds apiece by the time the cops find them, with the medical examiner describing them as having been turned into human pieces of jerky.
  • A less horrific version of this trope (at least compared to the above example) shows up in Hurricane Punch when Serge uses the combined heating packets of a great many military grade MREs (Meals Ready to Eat) in order to kill someone who was using the approaching hurricane as an excuse to price gouge people.
• Cool Shades: Recurring Femme Fatale Sharon often wears opaque sunglasses.
• Cover-Blowing Superpower: For a given definition of the term Agent Foxtrot has this problem. Foxtrot is probably the most well trained hand to hand combatant in the series and could easily resolve numerous physical confrontations, but not without revealing that Martha Davenport used to be a highly trained special ops agent for the US government.
• Covered in Gunge: In Atomic Lobster, during a bad trip that makes her think there are snakes in her hair, Addled Addict Rachael runs into a tree, tears at her hair, and then rolls on the ground, getting covered with blood and dirt, especially on her face. An observing Serge and Coleman agree that Beauty Is Never Tarnished is very much not in play.
• Crazy Enough to Work: As a general rule, the more insane one of Serge's schemes is, the more likely it is to work in the long run, even if it's not quite in the way he expected. Especially when it comes to killing people.
• Crime of Self-Defense: A nonfatal version occurs in the backstory of Naked Came the Florida Man. College football player Lamar Calhoun reflexively punched an abusive coach while trying to get free after about a minute of being strangled by the man. Calhoun was promptly arrested for battery (although he was let out of jail without serving any time in exchange for his silence), kicked off the team, and blackballed from the NFL and a career in P.E. (until he eventually lied on a job application) to cover up the coach's actions.
• Cringe Comedy: A frequent hallmark of any plot featuring the Davenports, something bad will happen to Jim who will fail to assert himself in response to it, and fairly frequently Martha's spitfire personality will only end up making it worse.
• Disproportionate Retribution: Most of the victims are assholes, but some don't seem to deserve death. Serge's victims tend to be greedy or rude, or worst of all in Serge's view vandalize some part of Florida's history or ecosystem.
• Draft Dodging: The Lt. Governor in Orange Crush never registered for the draft. To get around the scandal of a member of a senior government official technically being a draft dodger, his handlers arranged for him to join the state National Guard, with the intent of then filing fraudulent medical forms invalidating him from actually going into the field. They hadn't gotten around to filing said forms when his unit was called up to serve a tour of duty in Kosovo.
• Due to the Dead: The first sign of the Lt. Governor's Heel–Face Turn in Orange Crush is that after returning from the Balkans (where most of his squad were killed), he makes a point of visiting the families of every single one of his dead squadmates before returning to Tallahassee.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: Florida Roadkill only has two or three deaths caused by Serge; Serge, Coleman, and his associate Sharon are outwardly more villainous and less sympathetic than in later books; The focus of the story are two unrelated protagonists who get caught in the crossfire between Serge and the Mierda Cartel; and Serge seems a lot more interested in getting his money, offing people, and protecting himself than with the more public-centered goals of later books.
• Erudite Stoner: Coleman, combined with Genius Ditz, as while he clearly understands physics, mathematics, and chemisty seems to only understand how to use these things to get high.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Perhaps the one retroactive nice thing established about drug-abusing thief and murderer Sharon is that Atomic Lobster indicates that she had a good relationship with her younger sister Rachael despite them being Practically Different Generations. Sharon let Rachael (who grows up to be a less cold-blooded carbon copy of Sharon) crash with her sometimes. Ten years after Sharon's death, Rachael returns to the apartment due to a drug trip messing with her memories and making her think it is still a place where she's welcome. Rachael is also furious to learn that Serge and Coleman killed Sharon.
• Familial Foe: After Jim Davenport tricks Skag McGraw (an armed robber threatening Jim's baby daughter) into being killed by a defective car feature, Skag's brothers and cousins make repeated Avenging the Villain attempts on Jim's life throughout The Triggerfish Twist and Atomic Lobster, with Jim killing two more members of the family while Serge Storms defends him from others.
• Family Theme Naming: In Mermaid Confidential, Vixen (aka Vix) and her brothers Prancer, Comet, and Cupid were named after Santa’s reindeer by their Christmas-obsessed parents. This resulted in Vix having a childhood full of teasing and beatings that led to her becoming a Christmas-hating, Ax-Crazy thief, murderer, and drug addict who will attack anyone who inquires about her name.
• Flock of Wolves:
  • Hammerhead Ranch Motel has a scene with a drug ring staffed entirely by undercover agents of three different law enforcement agencies that try to bust each other at the same time.
  • Another book featured a group of Cuban-Americans who try to come up with a plan to overthrow Castro. With the exception of a retired CIA agent, they all work for Cuban Intelligence, and everybody knows it.
• Foreshadowing: In The Stingray Shuffle, Sam, Rebecca, and their friends meet in a dorm for single mothers at the University of Florida and have a Commonality Connection that they give the Let Us Never Speak of This Again treatment. A later scene mentions that Preston moved halfway across the country to attend the University of Nevada several months after getting a classmate named Becky pregnant. Becky is a common nickname for Rebecca, Florida is across the country from Nevada, and sure enough, everyone in Sam's group of friends is someone who Preston got pregnant with a Bed Trick.
• Freudian Excuse: Florida Roadkill indicates that Coleman's obsession with doing drugs over socializing and his complacency in following Serial Killer Serge around stems from an abusive childhood. His father stuck him in a cooler for several hours for interrupting his viewing of a football game, and his classmates mocked him for years afterward whenever they hard the story.
• Friendly Sniper: In Orange Crush, Sergeant Rock Tex Jackson is A Father to His Men and is willing to fight numerically superior enemies to keep civilians from being massacred. The sniper part isn't overly emphasized, but in one scene he climbs a tree with his rifle and the narration notes that he's relying on his experience as a deer hunter. His platoon mates hear three shots, and are still trying to figure out if Tex shot their pursuers or got shot by them when he appears behind them and says to start moving.
• Foreshadowing: In Atomic Lobster the Diaz Brothers point out that there are typically two ways that a former government special operative like Agent Foxtrot will behave in civilian life: they'll either start snapping at even the smallest irritation or they'll become a complete pushover. Foxtrot does indeed fit one of these descriptions.
• Fourth-Date Marriage: In Torpedo Juice Serge suddenly gets the urge to get married, stop his murderous rampage against Jerkass Floridians, and settle down. He quickly latches onto a mousy-looking but cute librarian named Molly, dates her once (and kills a guy in front of her), and promptly marries her. She quickly turns out to be a Black Widow (no not the comic book character) who kills her husbands not for money but for the sadistic kick. When they realize they each married a Serial Killer with opposing philosophies over why they kill, they separate. They're technically still married by the time of Shark Skin Suite (mainly because Molly won't sign the divorce paperwork)...
• Fun T-Shirt: In the tenth book, recurring Motor Mouth suburbanite Gladys wears a pink t-shirt that says "Diva in Training".
• Geeky Turn-On: Serge and history. Especially Florida history. Whenever Serge is bedding a hot woman, he can't stop talking about whatever historic topic he's currently fixated on.
• George Jetson Job Security: Jim Davenport's job is to induce this. First he gets hired by companies to perform mass layoffs to make their stock go up. Then, when they realize that they can't meet their business commitments because they're critically understaffed due to unnecessary mass layoffs, they hire him as a headhunter, at which point he rehires all the people he had fired a few weeks earlier.
• The Good Chancellor: in Orange Crush an amnesiac Serge gets a job on the governors staff and provides him quality advice (and protection from assassins) while getting him to see more of Florida and understand the people better.
• Handsome Lech: the Recurring Character of Johnny Vegas the Accidental Virgin, a total hunk who's never had sex and all of his attempts to do so keep failing spectacularly.
• Heel–Face Turn:
  • The young Republican Governor at the beginning of Orange Crush had been groomed since birth to become the next great (corrupt) conservative leader of the state. He's pretty much a spoiled rich brat even in his thirties. Events conspire to send him off to Central Europe during the Balkan civil wars where he bonds with poor-class troops and a badass sergeant, most of whom die in a heavy engagement before the governor gets rescued. His shell-shock wakes him up and he tries to become a better governor, but events (and the political status quo) keep screwing him over...
  • The Mole for The Cartel in Gator-a-Go dies rather than participate in one final atrocity.
  • In Pineapple Grenade, Ted Savage is introduced as a CIA agent stirring up guerillas to destabilize an honest South American president (indirectly on behalf of Corrupt Corporate Executives) but goes on to help Serge protect the president from an assassin after feeling betrayed by his handlers, and seems invested in his new mission.
  • In Coconut Cowboy, one of the errand boy trio for the Small-Town Tyrant clan gradually becomes friendly with their Unwitting Pawn turned scapegoat, helps him out of a jam, and decides to go to trade school.
  • In The Pope of Palm Beach, a group of Dirty Cops are outraged enough by the murder of a Man of the City and two of their colleagues to kill the cartel goons responsible and then work to protect a witness to the crime rather than try to kill him and steal the millions of dollars he ended up instinctively taking from the crime scene.
  • In No Sunscreen for the Dead, New-Age Retro Hippie Tofer Baez was a high-profile Soviet spy for much of the Cold War. However, he has come to acknowledge the worst aspects of the Russian government and would have quit before the end of the Cold War if he wasn't being blackmailed. When old Russian contacts still in America start being murdered, he sets out to warn people who he had manipulated into giving information that they may be in danger as well and assists Serge and various other guest characters in the climactic shootout.
  • At the beginning of Tropic of Stupid, Nathan Sparrow is an ambulance-chasing workaholic lawyer and fundraiser for slimy politicians. The sudden death of his Parental Substitute and a disgruntled client trying to ruin Nathan's daughter's career makes Nathan reevaluate his life. He quits his job, makes restitution to people he has wronged, destroys the career of the man who went after his daughter, and takes up a Call to Agriculture.
  • In Mermaid Confidential, cartel member Mercado inserts himself into the life of hospice worker Julie to provide for her and her patients to atone for the one time he personally killed someone (a Badass Bystander near a botched drug deal).
• Hero of Another Story: Many books have supporting or minor characters who have colorful pasts and are involved in their own adventures that Serge has little to no role in (although some would be more of an Anti-Hero of another story). This is most notable with Serge's neighbors during his brief periods of living in suburban neighborhoods or condos (all of whom are introduced in a rambling tangent alongside other more important characters in each book).
  • The minor neighbors in Triggerfish Twist include an inventor who has spent twelve years building a plane in his garage, another is a surviving member of Doolittle’s Raiders, and a third claims to be a former Negro League baseball pitcher.
  • The Atomic Lobster neighbors include two men in Witness Protection and a Genocide Survivor turned plastic surgeon.
  • The Bit Character condo dwellers in Mermaid Confidential and The Maltese Iguana include board game tournament champion Jen-Jen, Joey (an expelled Scholarship Student football star who was expelled from school for breaking into a chemistry lab and is on the run to avoid process servers out to make him repay the scholarship funds), Alfred and Hazel (who use fake names for reasons no one is quite sure of), Professor Fontaine (an academic testing how long it's possible to live off of delivered goods without ever stepping out of his apartment), Mr. Kelley (who has spent years faking an injury while being spied on by insurance company detectives) and Sit Aston Neville ("the last heir of an infertile lineage on a cluster of North Sea islands dominated by rookeries").
• Hidden Depths:
  • Coleman, considering his knowledge of fluid dynamics, advanced physics, college-level chemistry, and philosophy. Which he uses solely to get drunk and high.
  • The only times violent Femme Fatale Sharon shows interest in anything but drugs, sex, and money in the first book are when she gets interested in one of Serge's monologues about rocket ships, calls a psychic hotline for criminal advice, and enjoys watching a baseball game while reflecting that she has always wanted a World Series Ring (which she gets by robbing a player).
  • In Atomic Lobster, Rachael, a Pretty Freeloader and Addled Addict with a Hair-Trigger Temper, knows enough about computers to create and run a profitable website. Granted, it's a porn site with pictures of herself, but Serge is surprised she even knows how to turn a computer on (especially since the book is set in 2008). She also has a unicorn tattoo and loves the band Good Charlotte.
• Historical Character's Fictional Relative:
  • In Electric Barracuda, Molly's supposed son with Serge was really fathered by real-life Florida photographer Lucky Cole.
  • Tropic of Stupid reveals that Serge is a distant cousin of real-life retired baseball player Bill Lee.
• Hot Librarian: Molly, in Serge's love-lorn opinion. Which proves correct once they get married and Molly turns out to be as sexually powerful and adventurous in bed as Serge. too bad Molly turns out to be a Serial Killer with a different agenda than Serge's...
• Hollywood Autism: In The Riptide Ultra-Glide a pair of special needs teachers (who thus really should know better) refer to one of their young female students who is explicitly not inspirationally disadvantaged, cries so hard that she gives herself nosebleeds and requires intervention from said teachers to fall asleep as having "one of the mildest forms of autism."
• Hollywood Psych: Serge has many hallmark traits of a sociopath, but clearly isn't a true example; he does have genuine compassion for the innocent and goodhearted, and most of what he does follows some weird line of logic and morality that actually kind of makes sense... sort of. He also lacks the self-centeredness inherent in sociopaths. Overall, his violent tendencies, loose grasp on reality, and extreme and excessive devotion to the things he cares about (especially where his beloved home state of Florida is concerned), and his history of medication, and we just get the sense that something is wrong with him... but it's probably useless to try and guess what.
• The Immodest Orgasm: Serge's various romantic partners tend to loudly and expressively indicate when they near the end of lovemaking while Serge himself is distracted watching sunrises or chatting about local trivia.
  Sharon in Triggerfish Twist: Oh, my pussy! My Wet. Hot. Snapping. Pussy! Yip-yip-yip-yip, Eeeeee-hawwwww!
• Immune to Drugs: Just about everyone except Serge, who uses no drugs whatsoever.
  • Including his medications...
  • Except in Gator-A-Go-Go where Serge accidentally ate a tray-full of Coleman's "herb-enhanced" brownies.
    Serge: Coleman! How... Do... I... Turn... This... Shit... OFF!...
  • Likewise Serge gets dosed with a unspecified but small amount of MDMA/Molly in Coconut Cowboy and has a very extreme reaction to it.
• Inspector Javert: Detective Mahoney, a homicide cop assigned to the string of deaths that Serge leaves all across Florida. A parody of noir gumshoes, Mahoney can never get enough solid evidence to nail Serge for his murder spree or in other circumstances because Serge helps stop an even worse criminal.
• It Will Never Catch On: In Mermaid Confidential, Serge hears about a man taking part in a study of how long it is possible for him to survive without ever leaving his apartment and instead simply using the internet and various apps to have all his food and other necessities delivered to his door. Serge instantly questions what practical use such a study could have. The joke is made yet more explicit at the tail end of the novel when it is directly stated that the book takes place in December 2019
• Karma Houdini: Serge. The police (and Mahoney) can barely keep up with him.
• Karmic Death: While many of Serge's death traps and other murder methods are rather random, sometimes, the punishment has some relation to the Asshole Victims offense, although YMMV on whether some are karmic or disproportionate.
  • Downplayed in The Stingray Shuffle, where Preston loves Hypno Fool Jerkassery that extends to Bed Trick sexual assault, with the only question about his inevitable death being whether one of the many guest characters he has wronged will kill him before Serge can. Preston's cause of death is Serge hypnotizing him into having a shock-induced heart attack and then breaking his neck to Make Sure He's Dead.
  • In Pineapple Grenade, Serge kills the Big Bad who got Serge's Girl of the Week killed by tying him to the seat of a vehicle that is rigged to drive straight through an area that would normally be harmless to traverse but is currently on fire because of an ecological disaster that Serge's victim's greed caused.
  • Tiger Shrimp Tango has a rare accidental Karmic Death after Serge's scheming leads to a pair of con artists (who stole money that was intended for a child with cancer) being chased by a lynch mob. Eventually, the desperate scammers risk darting across an intersection to try to lose their pursuers.
    Coleman: I don't think they see that bus.
    Serge: Which bus?
    Coleman: The big one with the ad on the side for the children's hospital…Ooo! God!
    Serge: That's ironic.
  • In Coconut Cowboy, the proprietor of a crush video website is trampled by a hippo.
  • In The Pope of Palm Beach:
    • Serge makes Sterling Hanover, a Corrupt Corporate Executive who arbitrarily jacked up the prices of life-saving drugs, ingest brain-eating amoeba. Serge releases Sterling near a drugstore but doesn't leave him enough money to pay for the treatment drug at its current unreasonable price, with Sterling getting No Sympathy and no help from the pharmacists and paramedics who could help him but have seen people die because of his greed. A freak accident caused by his confusion and desperation kills him before the amoeba can, though.
    • A man who was trying to keep a bunch of baby sea turtles from making it safely to the ocean for laughs has his feet tied to the turtles' parents, who drag him into the ocean, where they will likely either drown him by diving in deep water or draw and quarter him by swimming in different directions.
  • A man who poisons seagulls in Naked Came the Florida Man is forced to ingest that same poison while simultaneously being staked out on a beach, covered with chips that attract sharp-beaked seagulls (one of which quickly pecks through his femoral artery).
  • A rude Hummer owner blasting out rap music from his car gets tied up within an empty skyscraper that Serge converts into the world's largest speaker... and then Serge plugs in his guitar...
• Kavorka Man: Serge is described as reasonably attractive, but my god does he get the ladies.
  • Supposedly his mental issues give him incredible charisma.
  • And stamina.
  • In later novels Dorsey introduced another satellite character, a plain-looking middle-aged guy tired of women constantly falling for him... whose personal confidence and attitude makes him a target for women constantly falling him. And yes, he's ruined more than one date for Johnny the Accidental Virgin.
• Killer Outfit: In Florida Roadkill, a man is murdered by fashion. His girlfriend Sharon drugs him, slips a pair of tight jeans onto him, and then carefully soaks and dries out the pants until the fabric shrinks to the point where it cuts off all blood circulation below his waist.
• Laser-Guided Amnesia: Serge suffers it at the beginning of Orange Crush. Even though he spends most of the novel thinking he's someone "sane", he still goes off on his occasional rampages whenever someone threatening his beloved state (and the reformed governor he's trying to get re-elected) shows up on his radar.
• Left Hanging: While Pineapple Grenade ends with Serge killing the Big Bad, nothing gets mentioned about whether the corrupt generals back in Costa Gorda suffer any comeuppance and will be in a position to try to continue with their plans to undermine their president and allow oil drilling near protected coral reefs.
• A Lighter Shade of Black: Serge is not a good person, but the people he goes after are usually worse than he is — or at least, less likable, so the audience can root for him anyway. If the choice is between an eccentric, amusing Serial Killer and someone whose a Corrupt Corporate Executive and/or a complete jerkass to boot, the serial killer tends to win.
• Luke, I Am Your Father: Mahoney and Serge are half brothers, something which was a surprise to both of them. Mahoney actually gives up the chase when he learns about this.
• Man of the City: In The Pope of Palm Beach, Darby Pope is a local surfer who is famous for knowing everyone in the town of Riviera Beach. He is always giving people friendly greetings and happily does whatever favors anyone asks. Even the Dirty Cops view him with pure respect.
• Meaningful Rename: When Nathan Sparrow decides to become a better person he starts going by "Bobby" based on his middle name (Robert) again just like he did when he was younger and less jaded, rather tellingly even the narrator instantly starts calling the character "Bobby" and never refers to them as "Nathan" again for the rest of the book.
• Meet Your Early-Installment Weirdness: A more grounded example of this happens in Atomic Lobster, where Serge's Girl of the Week is Rachael, a Femme Fatale coke fiend who oozes sexual energy but whose entire personality seems to revolve around drug use, as opposed to Serge's normal taste in women by this point in the series. In short, a perfect recreation of Sharon Rhodes from earlier in the series. It turns out the similarities are no coincidence as Rachael is Sharon's sister
• Mercy Lead: Mahoney has Serge more or less dead to rights at the end of Triggerfish Twist but given that Serge just helped him rescue an entire party full of people from the McGraw brothers, Mahoney settles for asking Serge for some more advice on where to grab his next meal. Though he promises that he'll arrest Serge properly in the future.
• Meta Guy: Serge's mental issues apparently make him able to perceive the fourth wall, and even break through it on occasion, such as the latter half of Pineapple Grenade.
• Missed Him by That Much: In Hurricane Punch we see that Serge and Detective Mahoney go to different therapists in the exact same building, and frequently even have sessions at the same time.
• Mistaken Confession: In Torpedo Juice, when two cops accost Anti-Hero vigilante/Serial Killer Serge, he wearily says that he bets they've come to talk about "all those murders" and, after a brief chat with them, confirms the death penalty looks likely. Then, it turns out that they aren't talking about, Serge's murders, but a crime spree committed by Serge's new wife Molly (they approached him to check his car for booby traps). Unlike most examples of the trope, Serge manages to keep the cops from realizing that they were talking about two different sets of murders and avoids arrest.
• Mistaken for Profound: At the end of Big Bamboo, director Werner Potemkin's "overindulgent unfocused pile of steaming sh*t" (which among other things included the Death Star Trench Run and the parting of the Red Sea in a film about an Oklahoma oil scam) is praised by Europeans critics as "a delicious self-parody of an obsessed director on the brink of madness"
• Morality Chain Beyond the Grave: In Tropic of Stupid all it takes is a single letter from the recently deceased Father Al echoing some of the advice he gave years ago to convince Nathan Sparrow to quit his job, sell his house, give the money to charity, and otherwise start being a better person.
• Nice Guy: The guest protagonist(s) of any of the novels will usually be some innocent, hard-working, personally affable person or couple... getting dumped on by outside forces (usually greedy bosses or corrupt politicians). They'll be unflinchingly nice no matter what.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: Some of Serge's victims are loosely based on national and state-level celebrities, who tend to receive the appropriate Karmic Death related to their terrible on-air personas.
  • The political parody Orange Crush has cameos by Real Life political figures Lawton Chiles and Jimmy Carter, and Expy appearances of the Bush family, Katherine Harris, and other figures involved with the 2000 Election debacle.
  • Sterling Hanover from Pope of Palm Beach is an obvious stand in for Martin Shkreli, as he's a CEO famous (say better infamous) for raising the cost of life saving medicine from 14 dollars to 700.
• Oddball in the Series: Orange Crush easily stands out compared to all the others. It's still a wacky romp set in Florida, but it is much more character driven piece and the only novel in which Serge doesn't appear. At least at first.
  • To a lesser extent, The Big Bamboo still focuses on Serge, but it trades the normal zany madcap Florida antics for zany madcap Hollywood antics.
• Only in Florida: Dorsey, like certain other Floridian humorists, loves this trope.
• Only Known by Their Nickname: You'd have to read Florida Roadkill to know that Coleman is actually a nickname the character picked up after spending hours locked in an cooler as a child.
• The Other Darrin: Coleman gets replaced by Lenny pretty early in the series when Dorsey kills off Coleman by drug dealers after Serge's stolen insurance money. But Dorsey quickly regretted the move and has Coleman return by explaining his death in the most contrived way possible. Lenny removes himself by getting arrested and placed under house arrest, only showing up for later cameos.
• Parents in Distress: Nicole Davenport is a Bratty Teenage Daughter for most of When Elves Attack, but one of her first Took a Level in Kindness moments comes from jumping on her boyfriend's back to try to stop him from beating up her dad over a minor slight.
• The Pornomancer:
  • Serge has a strong sexual appeal to most female characters and whatever he does once they get into bed tends to evoke wild and delighted passion from his lovers.
  • Some of Serge's Girl of the Week characters also tend to get hit on by a lot of men besides Serge and have strong sex drives, such as Sharon Rhodes from the first and fourth books and Rachael from Atomic Lobster, who Serge declares "Fucks like a hurricane."
• Practically Different Generations:
  • In Atomic Lobster, Rachael is exactly a decade younger than her only confirmed sibling (the Ambiguous Syntax of her comment that she once had "a sister in Tampa" could indicate a larger family), a sister who she is implied to have looked up to before the other woman's death.
  • In Mermaid Confidential, Mercado Benzappa, an Affably Evil cartel member, is 7-12 years younger than his only brother AJ (Mercado was in high school when AJ turned 25), who Mercado looks up to. Mercado mentions that they have at least three sisters, all between them in age.
• Punny Name: Serge's name is a play on "storm surge."
• Reality Has No Subtitles: A Separated by a Common Language version of this trope comes into play in the later books. Mahoney frequently speak in outdated Film Noiresque slang producing sentences like "Forty lengths out of the money at Aqueduct." and "Java juice on the tube-steak fader?", but since Serge understands him just fine no translation is provided for the reader.
• Recurring Character:
  • City and Country, two college girls fleeing from a crime they didn't commit. Their massive drug consumption (the two women are worse than Coleman) is why - despite the great sex - Serge keeps dumping the pair on the side of the road first chance he gets.
  • Also Johnny Vegas.
  • And the E-Team.
  • And the Davenports.
  • Characters from an early book will cameo in the following story to provide some continuity.
• Red Baron: Deconstructed in The Triggerfish Twist. Rufus, Sly, and Willie McGraw were bold career thieves who constantly avoided capture and operated comfortably under the radar until Rufus's B.O., Sly's politeness to his victims, and Willie's fondness for expensive suits resulted in them gaining nicknames like "The Rank Robber", "The Courteous Crook", and "The Dapper Bandit." These nicknames brought them so much notoriety that they were quickly identified and captured. In contrast, their brother Ed, who never did get a nickname, "took forever to catch."
• Reports of My Death Were Greatly Exaggerated: Sergio is still alive and healthy.
• The Reveal:
  • Hurricane Punch: The killer is actually McSwirley's split personality.
  • Cadillac Beach: The extremely unlucky foursome of condiment salesmen on conference are actually hired actors by the very mob that is trying to kill Serge.
• Rube Goldberg Device: Most of Serge's murder devices.
• Serial Escalation: Which eventually leads to particle accelerator bongs and skyscrapers used as murder weapons.
• Series Continuity Error: In Triggerfish Twist, Serge realizes that Mahoney is an undercover cop when Mahoney makes a mistake about the geography of the area that Serge grew up in. Later on however in Electric Barracuda, we find out that Serge and Mahoney were born in the same hospital and grew up roughly two blocks apart, so Mahoney would need to have been mistaken about what part of Florida his own home town was in to make this error.
  • A smaller one can be found in The Riptide Ultra-Glide where Serge reveals he has a pair of T-shirts based on a series of events in the Florida Keys that we saw unfold in several books ago. Coleman is unsure about how Serge could have gotten such shirts, despite Torpedo Juice being the book where the two were reunited, so he was very much present when Serge became an unwilling cult leader. Though unlike in Mahoney's example Coleman's long history of drug abuse makes it easy to believe he wouldn't actually remember those particular events.
• Sex Is Violence: Some of Serge's less healthy relationships (most notably with Sharon and Rachael) involve the couple hitting or threatening each other before and during sex. Coleman thinks Serge and Sharon's lovemaking is too mutually violent to count as actual rough sex and is more of "an alley fight with a quickie worked into the choreography."
  Across the street, Serge and Sharon were in their bedroom breaking lamps, throwing ashtrays, pulling knives, and otherwise making love.
• Sheep in Sheep's Clothing: A fair amount of Atomic Lobster seems to hint that Jim Davenport may actually be Agent Foxtrox, given Foxtrot's actual identity this trope comes into play.
• Shoo the Dog: Early in the B-plot of The Maltese Iguana, a cop in Honduras frames a U.S. State Department bureaucrat friend of his for drug possession but agrees to drop the charges if he leaves the country immediately. He does this not out of corruption or contempt for the bureaucrat, but in an attempt to get him out of the country before he gets killed trying to investigate a notoriously violent cartel.
• Shout-Out: Any movie or book based in Florida will get referenced by Serge.
• Shown Their Work: Dorsey knows his Florida history, and a lot of what Serge talks about actually happened in the state. His novels can double as travelogues to some of the more unique and interesting places to visit.
  • Some plots involve specific events that take place in Florida. In the first novel Serge and Coleman attend Game 7 of the 1997 World Series. Orange Crush and Hurricane Punch followed real-life events like Election 2000 and the 2004 hurricane season that saw four major storms smash into Florida.
• The Shut-In: The Pope of Palm Beach features an author who became this after witnessing a organized crime related murder and spends several decades without leaving his home, all while growing progessively more paranoid.
• Siblings in Crime:
  • The McGraw Brothers from Triggerfish Twist are a group of dangerous rednecks with long rap sheets. A carjacking victim killing one of the brothers in self-defense in Triggerfish Twist sets the rest of the family on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge that doesn't go as planned.
  • In The Big Bamboo, Serge joins his newly discovered half-brother Ford in a scheme to con two corrupt movie producers and then engineer their deaths.
  • In Gator-a-Go, The Queenpin known as Madre once ran her cartel along with her two older brothers before the informant she spends the book chasing mucked things up a few years before the story. Specifically, when a Dirty Cop told Madre that one of her brothers passed on information to the authorities but she didn't know which, she cheerfully ordered the murders of both of her brothers to make sure she punished the right one.
  • There are a few sets of brothers in the Small-Town Tyrant clan from Coconut Cowboy. Said clan runs speed traps, illegally pumps more water than allowed by law, engages in voter fraud, moves money around for a drug dealer, and kills a few people.
• A Simple Plan:
  • Serge will have some harebrained scheme to either generate money, steal money, kill bad people, or promote the great state of Florida. Sometimes all four at once. They're really not planned out well. And yet, they work.
  • Guest-starring villains of a particular novel have some scheme going on, only for Serge or the overall craziness of Florida itself ruining the scheme halfway through the novel.
  • The innocent people who get wrapped up in Serge's plots or the bad guys' plans have a simple plan themselves: try to survive to the last page of the book.
• Single Woman Seeks Good Man: If there's a single woman major character, odds are she'll be frustrated by the jerks in her life... and meet up with either Serge who'll unleash her inner Bad Girl, or with the Nice Guy character trying to survive Serge's latest scheme who will politely ask her out on a romantic date.
• Southern-Fried Genius:
  • Story Long from Nuclear Jellyfish is a stripper from Jacksonville who enjoys drinking cold beer, wearing cutoff jeans, and in-depth discussions of Supreme Court rulings, Senate filibusters, Florida history, and the Code of Hammurabi.
  • Jasper from Clownfish Blues is an Apalachicola fisherman who digs up his own bait and whose appearance prompts a Deliverance joke, only for Jasper to reveal that, unlike most people Serge knows, he's read the original book by James Dickey, along with the works of James Joyce and William Faulkner
    Jasper: Dad-gum right I know Dickey, Southern literary lion, and poet loreee-ate.
  • Darby Pope from The Pope of Palm Beach may look and sometimes act like just a Florida beach hippie but is one of the best-read people in town.
  • Benmont Pinsch from No Sunscreen for the Dead is a brilliant data analyst who previously worked for a company converting textbooks into digital materials for online classes. He hails from a Tennessee coal mining town that is implied to have had a lot of bright kids in it, as his high school girlfriend and ex-wife won a pi-memorizing competition at their school.
• Spanner in the Works: Serge and Coleman usually have no idea the size and scope of the schemes around them, but every book wind they wind up dismantling them as people try to figure out who they are.
• Springtime for Hitler: Various criminal gangs and corrupt corporate heads have some scheme to make money off of a hare-brained plan, only for the cover story of the operation creating too much success for them to hide their criminal activity.
  • In Stingray Shuffle the worst cartel in the world has the bright idea of dealing drugs out of a bookstore that sold only copies of works by Ralph Krunkleton - a Giftedly Bad writer of pulp almost-classics - by cutting out the pages and hiding the dime bags inside each book. Thing was, their book orders for Krunkleton's titles attract the attention of the publisher making the company think there's a revival of his writing going on, and they insist on the bookstore hosting an author's signing in the middle of the store's drug sales...
  • In Shark Skin Suite, two law firms involved in a lawsuit against crooked bankers are secretly both business partners with the bank, and the plaintiffs' firm tries to throw the case by doing things like leaking information, assigning inexperienced or eccentric lawyers to try the case, keeping good witnesses off the stand and having bad witnesses testify. To their exasperation, the trial still goes in the plaintiffs' favor because their lawyers are far better than anyone realized (and eventually have Vigilante Man Serge providing behind-the-scenes help) and the defense lawyers are complete morons who make one mistake after another.
• Stern Chase: Serge and Coleman are on a never-ending road trip across Florida, helping out anyone they view as being deserving of their help and brutally killing anyone who made their new friends need that help (and almost anyone else who offends or antagonizes Serge). How actively pursued they are varies from book to book, but between the fact that they are wanted fugitives and enjoy traveling anyway, they rarely spend two consecutive books in the same town (and even when they do, it is usually because of a major event like COVID quarantine protocols).
• The Stoner: Coleman or Lenny, depending on the book.
  • They meet in Atomic Lobster, and soon build the world's largest bong out of an aquarium. Then between books some Australians top that with a bong made out of a phone booth, so they reclaim their record by breaking into a university physics lab and making a bong out of a particle accelerator. This gets Coleman and Lenny the title of 'The Bong Brothers', and Coleman is regarded the ultimate dope guru, who other stoners go to for advice on all their drug-related problems (That is, problems with drugs, not problems caused by using drugs).
  • A lot of other characters are heavy users, as well. If they hang around Coleman long enough, by the end of the novel they will be.
• Strong Family Resemblance: Sharon from the first and fourth books and Rachael from Atomic Lobster turn out to be sisters and are described almost exactly the same way. Both are six feet tall and have large breasts, long blonde curls, full lips, shapely legs, and freckles. Furthermore, there is a ten-year age gap between them and Serge and Coleman meet them ten years apart, causing them to comment on the resemblance (and the two women's similar temperaments and circumstances in life) long before the relationship is revealed.
• Sure, Let's Go with That: In When Elves Attack, Serge tells Coleman that City and Country are only making out because City is horny, never has sex with Serge, and her only other option is the unappealing Coleman. Coleman interprets this as them wanting to put on a Girl on Girl Is Hot show for his benefit, and Serge halfheartedly tells him to keep thinking that.
• Suspiciously Similar Substitute:
  • Before retconning stoner Sidekick Coleman's death in the first book, the author had Serge acquire a second stoner sidekick, Lenny, for several books. In Gator-a-Go, when City and Country meet Coleman for the first time, they immediately compare him to Lenny. Serge replies, "Coleman's the original: Lenny, beta version, initial glitches intact."
  • After Sharon is written out of the series (minus one Anachronic Order reappearance), the next book introduces Recurring Character Ingrid "Country" Praline, another blond woman who sometimes does drugs (albeit weed instead of coke), dresses revealingly, and assists Serge throughout various schemes that she is often apathetic to while having regular Coitus Ensues moments with Serge and bickering with him and his friends just as regularly. However, unlike Token Evil Teammate Sharon, Country is a Nice Girl, or a Jerk with a Heart of Gold at worst after some negative Character Development, values her friendships, doesn't commit crimes out of greed, can be more genuinely helpful than Sharon, and avoids the Sex Is Violence aspect of Serge and Sharon's relationship.
  • By the time of Atomic Lobster (book 10), Serge tends to date women of a higher intellectual caliber than Sharon and Country (with his occasional reunions with Country being among the rare exceptions to this). However, like Sharon, his Meet Your Early-Installment Weirdness Girl of the Week Rachael is a blond stripper with criminal inclinations (although Rachael is more of a Shameless Fanservice Girl petty crook compared to Sharon's status as The Vamp and an Ax-Crazy armed robber and Black Widow with a high body count), a preoccupation with doing coke, a fiery temper, and a Sex Is Violence relationship with Serge. Serge and Coleman lampshade the trope and comment it's like the two women were separated at birth. They only reconsider this opinion at the end of the book, upon learning that Sharon and Rachael are actual sisters rather than Identical Strangers. Rachael also has a dancing style that is nearly identical to Country's.
  • Story from Nuclear Jellyfish (book 11) has many notable similarities to Rachael, some but not all of which she also shares with Sharon. Both are strippers with similar appearances who can be hot-headed and, near the end of their respective books, are set up to potentially have dangerous fallings out with Serge due to harm that befell their respective siblings. However, the two also diverge in many ways. Rachael is coarse, undriven, and dim, while Story is an intelligent and articulate part-time college student. Rachael gets wasted and tries to kill Serge with little to no premeditation after learning that he killed her sister. Story is seemingly plotting to manipulate and kill Serge from their first meeting because she wrongly thinks he put her brother in the hospital, but the ending reveals she always knew Serge was innocent and has been working with him to kill the real culprits.
• Taught by Experience: After nearly having been tracked down and attacked by someone his consulting company was brought onboard to fire in Triggerfish Twist Jim Davenport uses a fake name while firing people in When Elves Attack.
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill: How most of the visiting bad guys in a story overreact when their plans go awry. Subverted with Serge, who only kills those he feels deserve it. While his deathtraps are elaborate, they only target the intended victim. And even then, he gives the victim a way out, usually.
• Thicker Than Water: This trope finally ends Mahoney's career of chasing Serge. When the two turn out to be half brothers, Mahoney doesn't have the heart to arrest Serge. Future novels show he completely quit the force and now works as a private investigator who helps Serge finds victims to help/villains to punish.
• Those Two Guys:
  • Serge and Coleman in the first book, where surprisingly they aren't really protagonists.
  • Fulbright and Boudreaux, two members of the governor's military unit in Orange Crush, provide some comic relief and constantly appear together.
• Time Skip: The series isn't written in chronological order. For example, the amnesia Serge suffered in Orange Crush wasn't explained until Stingray Shuffle which was published two novels later.
  • And some novels will rely heavily on flashbacks.
• This Looks Like a Job for Aquaman: Ziggy Blade is by and large a horrible lawyer but his knowledge of case law as it relates to illicit substances is second to none.
• Token Evil Teammate: Evil-er teammate in this particular case. Looking at the starting trio in Florida Roadkill Serge has the redeeming features of truly loving Florida and doesn't intentionally target the truly innocent Coleman simply bumbles his way through life in a friendly manner but Sharon Rhodes is a cocaine obsessed Femme Fatale who repeatedly and cheerfully commits cold=blooded murders for money and utterly lacks any redeeming qualities.
  • In Atomic Lobster, the character of Rachael is a Suspiciously Similar Substitute to Sharon and is just as rude, preoccupied with snorting coke (to Addled Addict levels) and unhelpful toward Serge and Coleman as Sharon, although she's less prone to robbing and killing people and only tends to be actively malicious and dangerous toward people who seriously antagonize her first.
• Too Much Alike: Coleman and Lenny start off both thinking the other is a loser. Though unlike most cases of this trope they fairly quickly change their tunes once they realize how deep the other's knowledge of narcotics goes.
• Touché: In The Riptide ultra-glide, Serge is Out-Gambitted by two assassins who only spare his life out of Pragmatic Villainy (the continuing police manhunt for Serge will distract the cops from realizing what the assassins did). Serge threatens to reveal the truth, but the assassins point out he's insane and therefore not credible, which Serge concedes with a wry "Touche."
• Train Job: The climax of The Stingray Shuffle begins when Ivan and Zigzag learn that a briefcase of drug money is on a mystery theater train and borrow some horses from a racetrack to catch up to the moving train (the passengers think their pursuit is All Part of the Show), board it, and try to take the money at gunpoint.
• True Companions: Serge's grandfather's old crew of con artists are among the most closely-knit characters in the series, sticking together for decades even as several of their members begin dying of natural causes, with their various kids and grandkids also being part of their circle, which is most prominently depicted in Electric Barracuda.
• Unexplained Recovery: Serge and Coleman actually died at the end of the first book. Next book, they were back, and it was never really explained how they survived.
• Vague Age: Serge is a subtle victim of this due to the series extended nature. He was born in the sixties and the series started in 1999. By the time of Hurricane Punch (2007) he was in his mid forties. Each book in the series tends to take place roughly a year or two before its real life publishing date. This means that Serge should be effectively in late fifties/early sixties by the time of Maltese Iguana (which we can tell takes place in 2021 because Serge gets a freshly available COVID-19 vaccine) but if that's the case there's nothing in the books (other than the date of his birth) to suggest it.
• Vapor Wear: Early in Atomic Lobster, Serge and Coleman observe that Rachael has gone braless under her favorite t-shirt so often that her nipples have made stretch marks in the fabric.
• Villain Protagonist: Our hero, the serial killer.
• The Watson: A large part of Coleman's role is to be someone Serge can talk to about the workings of his Death Traps, his travel plans, and his opinions about societal events, Florida, or other people.
• Weak Boss, Strong Underlings: By the time of Mermaid Confidential, long-time drug cartel leader Raffy Benzappa is a senile old man who is preoccupied with watching 1960s sitcoms, has his sons (who he rarely recognizes anymore) handle the family business, and, during his lucid moments, displays occasional disappointment at how violent the escalating cartel wars are. His younger son Mercado is Good with Numbers but a Non-Action Guy who rarely even talks about the cartel's killings. On the other hand, the family's scores of fiercely loyal enforcers are skilled gunfighters and strategic assassins who are merciless to their enemies.
• Wham Line: One subplot in Atomic Lobster involves a mysterious Famed In-Story Retired Badass undercover operative, Agent Foxtrot, who comes out of retirement to foil a terrorist plot. The epilogue of the book has a recurring character, stay-at-home mom turned empty nester Martha Davenport, the wife of resident Butt-Monkey Jim Davenport call someone on an encrypted satellite phone and say "This is Foxtrot."
• What Happened to the Mouse?: There's a series length version in Maltese Iguana as despite recurring character Reevis Tome get his own B-plot, no reference of any kind is made to fellow recurring character Brook Campanella who was dating Reevis when we last saw him in Clownfish Blues.
• Writer on Board:
  • Dorsey attended Auburn University. One of his villains is a former football player from the University of Alabama, Auburn's rival. Cue one very unsympathetic (and idiotic) villain.
  • As a journalist-turned-author, Dorsey is sympathetic to the newspaper publishing industry. Especially in Hurricane Punch and Shark Skin Suite. He worked for the Tampa Tribune, and a lot of novels are based or have scenes in that metro.
• You Go, Girl!: The main subplot of Naked Came the Florida Man is Academic Athlete Chris, who has always been a faster runner than her male classmates but hasn't gotten much respect for it, joining her school's football team with the help of Team Dad Coach Calhoun.