Dorsey was born in Indiana but moved to Florida at an early age. He grew up in Riviera Beach, a small town in Palm Beach County just north of West Palm Beach. Dorsey graduated from Bishop Guertin High School, located in Nashua N.H, in 1979.

He attended Auburn University, where he became the editor of The Auburn Plainsman, the student newspaper. Dorsey graduated in 1983 with a Bachelor's degree in Transportation. After graduation, he moved to Montgomery, Alabama and served as a police reporter for a local newspaper. In 1987, Dorsey relocated to Tampa, Florida and became a reporter for The Tampa Tribune. Until he resigned from the paper in 1999 to write full-time, he worked variously as a political reporter, a correspondent in the Tribune's Tallahassee bureau, copydesk editor, and finally the night metro editor and news coordinator.

Currently, Dorsey lives in Tampa with his wife and two daughters. He is a Boston Red Sox fan due to his mother and the nuns and brothers from Bishop Guertin High School he attended as a child being from New Hampshire.

All of Dorsey's novels feature Serge Storms as the primary character. The character has several coexisting mental illnesses that render him obsessive, psychopathic, schizophrenic, and frequently homicidal, but Storms serves as the anti-hero in Dorsey's works due to his strong sense of moral absolutism and justice. Serge is quite intelligent, and frequently devises wildly inventive ways of condemning villains (or at least who he perceives as such) to death. His co- pilot in his adventures is an individual known as Coleman who is the exact opposite of Serge. Where as Serge is high strung and straight edge, Coleman is a drug user who goes to extreme lengths in order to maintain his buzz.