Thank you NetGalley for the opportunity to read this novel early!

I really enjoyed this novel it’s like the synopsis says, The Outsiders meets Sons of Anarchy. I will keep the review spoiler free but it’s a fun thrilling good time! I’m looking much forward to more novels from Pan. This first novel is going to bring attention to his novel writing and leaving fans wanting more. Great read!

Florida Palms

Joe Pan’s debut novel, Florida Palms, is the story of Eddy, a young and fairly disadvantaged kid with a lot of innate talent and potential who is thrust almost against his will into a world of crime, gangs, and drugs. Let down by those whose job it was to take care of him, Eddy falls in with a group of people living on the margins. Along the way, he meets a lot of unsavory characters and learns the throughline of criminal organizations all over the world: a gang is a brotherhood until it is not. It is every man for himself. The “family” nonsense justifies the powerful preying on the weak and is just to buy the leaders time before someone from the rank and file comes for the crown.
As a sort of bildungsroman, Florida Palms follows Eddy as he witnesses bigotry, rampant drug abuse, mistreatment of women, and amoral behavior of every stripe imaginable, learning some hard lessons along the way. There are some problems. The “Florida Man” trope is on full display here, but cliches come into being because they contain some truth. Further, although the action is wall to wall criminality, law-enforcement is virtually nonexistent, except for one brief appearance of policemen acting as guns for hire. My major problem is that this book could have been about 150 pages shorter. Various characters, one in particular, engage in frequent discursive soliloquies. While these digressions expose some entertaining thoughts, they lose their effectiveness after a while. However, it is hard not to feel something akin to sympathy for Eddy, despite his many missteps and poor decisions.
I am grateful to Simon & Schuster, which made an ARC of Florida Palms available through NetGalley in exchange for an unbiased review

Ably rendered -- albeit way too leisurely trip -- through Florida drug dealing biker scuzz. Well written but breaking no new ground... and takies its sweet time about doing it. There's a good book buried in here, about half as long and honest about its intent.

Thank you to NetGalley and Simon & Schuster for the free eARC!

I was a huge fan of “Sons of Anarchy” when it first aired, so when the first line of the description said this was “The Outsiders” meets “Sons of Anarchy”, I knew I wanted to give this a read!

The story centers on best friends, Eddy, Cueball, and Jesse. Three young adults that are trying to come into their own on Florida’s Space Coast during the recession of the late 2000’s. Cueball’s ex-convict, biker dad runs a furniture moving company, so Eddy and Cueball get jobs there, and this quickly turns to a more nefarious job when Cueball’s dad decides to get back in the biker gang life, and has the boys running “shank”, a new designer drug that’s taking the East coast by storm. Both boys are tested, and things go off the rails.

This book was so well written! The writing absolutely absorbed me. I got through this in less than 24 hours somehow. I just couldn’t put it down. Keep in mind, this is a slow burn. It’s not as action packed as “Sons of Anarchy”, but it doesn’t need to be, and it doesn’t make it any less gripping. Can’t wait to read more of Joe Pan’s work!

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.

This was a really well done coming-of-age novel, it had that element that I was looking for and was engaged with what was happening. I was invested in what was going on and enjoyed the way this worked. Joe Pan has a strong writing style and was invested in what was going on.

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