Florida Palms (July 2025)
By Joe Pan
Simon and Schuster, 480 pages.
★★★★

Perhaps you've read gritty Florida crime novels from Carl Hiaasen, Tim Dorsey, Elmore Leonard, or Randy Wayne White. I'm here to tell you that their work is akin to The Muppets Go to Miami Beach compared to Florida Palms, a new novel from Joe Pan.

The Florida Space Coast is easy-viewing for Cape Canaveral launches, but that's about all that's easy about it. You might recognize 2009 as a tough recession year. That's when three young friends–Eddy, “Cueball” (Heath), and Jesse¬–graduate from high school. The three of them have part-time work moving furniture, but mostly they fish, smoke pot, and listen to the biker gangs talk smack. It's already been a tough year for best friends Eddy and Cueball; five members of their friends died before graduation. The future doesn't hold much promise. Eddy is smart enough to go to college, but on what? His more realistic dream is to one day open his own tattoo studio.

It's not a nice term, but most of the beach crowd qualifies as “poor white trash except that several–notably Jesse and his twin brother Draco–are mixed race. Poor Draco. He was intelligent until he held two sheets of LSD to his face and burned out his brain to the point of being monosyllabic. Another local guy gets his jollies by keeping baby alligators in a septic tank and glass cages of poisonous snakes and frogs in his garage. Even Eddy's job is tenuous; the moving company is a used van owned by Bird, Cueball's father, a former biker whose handle comes from having done time in San Quentin for drug running; he went from jailbird to free bird.

You'd think that Bird would be done with drug dealing, but you'd be wrong. Bird took the fall for Seizer, probably a misspelling of Caesar. However you arrange the letters, he's a big-time criminal who shows up in Florida with a scheme: Use young guys to move drugs up and down the East Coast under the pretense of moving furniture. Cueball and Eddy are among the first recruits, though Eddy is reticent. After all, he’s never been north of the Georgia border and realizes the inherent dangers. Plus, he has his eye on Gin, a tough young lady whose AWOL father was a Deadhead and a mother, Colt, who is now the partner of Del Ray, another biker turned hoodlum.

Before you can say “palm tattoo,” the bikers and teens are in cahoots. They know who's on the “team” by the inked palm trees on their hands designed by Eddy. Bird, assisted by Del Ray, are Seizer's heads of operation and many of the bikers work in camouflaged “factories” tucked into the swamps. In a warped way, everyone is a capitalist. The drug they are manufacturing–nicknamed shank–is all the rage. It's like crank (crystal meth) in a time- release formula that eventually chills out the user. Never mind that toxic chemicals are used or the fact that it's addictive. Seizer's not wrong, but perhaps you see flaws in the plan.

First of all, there's a lot of money involved. If you think young athletes and big money are a bad mix, what about guys barely shaving? Add anarchistic bikers, rival gangs, ethnic tension with Cuban drug runners, too much sampling of the product, old scores to settle, jealousy, and a power vacuum and it's easy for chemical dreams to become chaos, megalomania, suspicion, arson, and murder.

Will either the insightful Eddy or dumb-as-a-rock Cueball break from a life of crime? The novel's ending is simultaneously ambiguous and chilling. Pan’s novel makes your skin crawl and run to the shower. Why read it? If you think the purpose of a good book or movie is to take you places you're not likely to visit, Florida Palms is your ticket. You will enter the minds of some truly dangerous individuals. Social class issues come into play. Who buys the shank being produced by people you'd rather not know? Finally, it implies the answer to the old question of what happens when hope vanishes.

A few critiques. Florida Palms is overly wrong and suffers from the difficulty of keeping straight who is on what side in a tale that relies upon shifting alliances. Its moral is clear, though: Crime does pay, but don't wait too long to spend ill-begotten loot!

Rob Weir