Florida Palms
A Novel
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3,9 • Оценок: 8
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- 14,99 $
От издателя
The Outsiders meet Sons of Anarchy in this gripping debut about a group of young men dragged into a drug-running operation.
It’s 2009, the height of the Great Recession. Best friends Eddy, Cueball, and Jesse are fresh out of high school and wild at heart, but the economy is in the dumps. With jobs scarce along Florida’s Space Coast, they join a furniture-moving company run by Cueball’s father, a gruff ex-con biker who’s supposedly retired from the fast life. But when a mysterious old boss arrives in town, the payload is switched out, and the young men are coerced into shipping a new designer drug up the East Coast.
What is advertised as a bastion of brotherhood and respect quickly spirals into back-alley deals, bloodshed, and an all-out turf war that will test the bounds of love and friendship. Enticed by larger paychecks, and fueled by burgeoning drug habits, the young friends find themselves trapped between rank opportunists, warring gangsters, meth zombies, crazed bikers, and a blowgun-wielding hitman, all vying for a shot at the big time.
Soaring, ambitious, and deeply humane, Florida Palms is a gritty coming-of-age story with enormous heart and an unflinching vision of the violence and inequities facing forgotten communities. In a relentless race against desperate circumstances, the young friends must fully embrace the crime life or abandon their loyalties and risk ending up face down in the muck of the unforgiving swamps.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Pan debuts with a gritty but overlong tale of two working-class teenagers who break bad after graduating from high school on Florida's Space Coast. It's 2009, and Eddy and Cueball face a dim future amid the recession. Cueball's father, Bird, an ex-con who served time for drug trafficking, offers them a job driving a van for his furniture moving company. This leaves the friends plenty of time to fish and smoke weed, and for Eddy to hang out with his no-nonsense girlfriend, Gin. Then, Bird's former crime boss, Seizer, convinces him to use the company as cover to transport a new designer drug up the East Coast, and Bird brings Eddy and Cueball into the scheme. The two friends soon find themselves in the middle of a power struggle between Bird, Seizer, and a rival gang, with their lives and Gin's on the line. While the narrative loses sight of Eddy, Cueball, and Gin for long stretches, spending too much time on Bird's byzantine attempts to turn his small-time operation into a cartel, Pan convincingly portrays life in the shadow of the region's monolithic aerospace industry. The Space Coast atmosphere hasn't been more pungent on the page since Patrick Ryan's The Dream Life of Astronauts.
