Kirkus
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Doings dark and ditzy in a vintage South Florida apartment building. Wacky behavior by South Florida residents is the stuff of legend in tabloids and detective fiction. Landlord Norah McCarthy celebrates South Florida wackiness. She’s selected residents to fill the eight beachfront apartments in the Florodora, the 1920s Peerless Point building she inherited from her showgirl grandmother, according to how well they fit the Florida Man or Woman stereotype. The trials and tribulations of oddballs like Hitchcock fanatic Billie Morton, who once held up a convenience store wielding a banana; intense artist Mickey, who makes treasures out of sea trash; aging thespian Lennox; and motherly Calypso form the backbone of Viets’ South Florida tales. But the latest entry crams in a host of plotlines both inside and outside the Florodora’s Spanish colonial facade, beginning with a drunken proposal from Billie to Mickey and fanning out to include the strangulation of four young women on the Peerless Point beach, the rescue of wealthy socialite Abigail Peachtree’s cat from an alligator attack by trash collector Gil Shecker, a romance scam, the arrest of one of Norah’s tenants, and endless tension between Norah and her boyfriend, Dean. Some of the narrative arcs end up intersecting, some don’t, and some seem like total red herrings. Unlike Tim Dorsey’s tales, where seemingly random acts perpetrated by oddball characters converge in the end to offer readers an aha moment of chaotic logic, all Viets offers is an “OK, so that’s what that was” moment. Her colorful cast deserves better. More coherent plotting would help this zany crew shine. Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.