It was only after I’d purchased James W. Hall’s Tropical Freeze (got a deal on it) that I realized I’d already read the first book in this series (originally published in the late ‘80s), and didn’t much care for it. But having it at hand, I figured I’d give the series a second shot. Results: ambivalent.

Thorn (his only name) is a beach bum in Key Largo, Florida. He occupies his time making fishing lures and rebuilding his house, which got blown up in the last book. He gets a job offer from his friend Gaeton, who used to be an FBI agent. Now he works for Benny Cousins, another ex-FBI agent who runs a private security form. There’s a place there for Thorn, Gaeton says, if he wants it. Good money.

Thorn doesn’t want it. In fact, he takes an instant, intense dislike to Benny.

Then Gaeton disappears off the face of the earth. And Thorn falls for Darcy, Gaeton’s sister, who’s a weather girl in Miami. Darcy, in turn, is being stalked by a dim-bulb local bartender with delusions of Nashville stardom. Meanwhile, Benny Cousins is doing his best to make himself the most important man in Key Largo. And people who cross him have a way of vanishing mysteriously.

I wanted to like Tropical Freeze better than I did. The prose is really good – lines like “He was feeling sorry for Key Largo, for Florida, for North America. For men and women everywhere. For the race of lonely creatures that walked upright.” James W. Hall can turn a phrase (though he does have a problem with logical logistics, as when he has a guy carry three pistols in one hand).

But I found it impossible to like the characters in this book. The narrative forced us to spend considerable periods of time with sociopathic low-lifes, which always annoys me. But I didn’t even like the hero. I never had a sense of Thorn as a character. We’re told things about his background, but I never grasped him as a person.

And there’s was a pervading sense of gloom all through the story. I found it depressing.

Maybe you’ll like it better. Cautions for language and fairly explicit sexual situations.