Three broke Florida boys, fresh out of high school and wild at heart, get hired by a moving company run by one of their fathers: a gruff, felonious old Hells Angels biker who has supposedly retired from the fast life. But when a stranger from the father's past rolls into town, the boys' small world gets flipped upside down. They discover that the moving company is a front for a criminal organization shipping a new designer drug up the East Coast. Enticed by larger pay checks and fueled by burgeoning drug habits, the young friends soon find themselves mixed up with rank opportunists, meth zombies, killer cops, and a panther-hunting hitman, each fighting it out for a shot at the Big Time.
A crime novel, if one in fancy dress, and the palms of the book’s title are more than just a threadbare tropical cliché ... Perhaps Pan’s finest achievement is the novel’s heavy: a professional killer and all-around dirty-deeds man with the improbable moniker of Gumby ... Occasionally struggles with what might be termed 'first novel problems': the ambition to be all things to all people, to entertain us to within an inch of our lives, and to gobsmack us with its poetry ... Ventures a great deal more than most.
The novel never loses the coming-of-age feel, even when focused on characters other than Eddy and Cueball. It’s reminiscent of a cable television series starring characters trying to balance a normal life and criminality ... The narrative loses steam ... Some scenes might feel extraneous or overlong, but Florida Palms earns its payoff. When things really get out of control, readers have spent time in the heads of all the important players. And while the broad strokes of Pan’s novel might feel familiar, perhaps to a fault, the characters still feel like complicated people, experiencing the world in vivid, literary prose.
