A really great premise. Something about swampy Florida and shady people and drug dealing got me hooked. It is well written but seemed too long. About halfway through I just was hoping I would get to the end. Seems like it would be perfect for a TV show. I hoped there would be a coming of age or enlightenment for Eddy and Cueball and Gin but it sort of was coming but never did. That is ok but it didn’t totally hit the mark for me.

this was a good book!! It was entertaining, had some tense moments and made me think and wonder how this book would end. It was a good read and it kept me interested the whole way through

Thank you to NetGalley, to the author, and to the publisher for this complimentary ARC in exchange for my honest review!!!

Thank you to the author, publisher, and NetGalley for gifting me a free copy in exchange for my honest review.

This was...not my favorite book. There's something about a swampy south Florida thriller that always piques my interest (i.e. Bloodline on Netflix, anything set in the Everglades) and sadly this book just completely fell flat for me. 480 pages felt like way too long to tell this story from start to finish and I was just inherently bored at some points. I was hoping for this sweeping tale of Eddy and Cueball finding themselves amidst a wild throng of action and bloodshed but it was just kind of...dull? The writing itself was not bad - I just found myself growing incredibly impatient with how slow burn this story was. If that's your thing, you will eat this up. Three stars.

The premise of the book seemed promising: a band of misfit teens and bikers with a scheme to make and distribute drugs. The writing is excellent, and the characters are really well drawn. We see inside the minds of these young men, and somehow their choices, even the horrible ones, seem inevitable. But halfway in, I stopped rooting for them and found myself pushing through to finish the story.

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