Be Cool

New York Times bestselling author Elmore Leonard is back, and he's brought Get Shorty's Chili Palmer along for the ride.  An unforgettable, hilarious, and spot-on insider's look at Hollywood as only Leonard could write it, Be Cool takes readers on a back-side tour of Tinseltown's other big business--the music industry.

Chili Palmer's follow-up to his smash hit film Get Leo bombed, and in Hollywood, you're considered only as hot as your last project.  Once again outside the system, Chili is exploring an idea for his third film by lunching with a former "associate" from his Brooklyn days who's now a record label executive.  When lunch begins with iced tea and ends in a mob hit, Chili soon finds himself in an unlikely alliance with one of the LAPD's finest, Detective Darryl Holmes, and the very likely next target of Russian gangsters.  

With a hit man on his trail, Chili tries to pull together his next movie, the story of Linda Moon, a real-life singer with dreams that go further than her current gig with Chicks International, just doing Spice Girls songs.  She's desperate to tear loose from her current manager, an erstwhile pimp named Raji.  Orchestrating his movie as he goes along, Chili wrests the reins of Linda's singing career away from Raji, basing the plot of his new film on the action that unfolds as a result.  As he fakes his way to success in the music business with his trademark aplomb, Chili manipulates his adversaries and advances his friends, showing all how to be cool when the heat's on.

With his unique combination of the good, the bad, and the unexpected, Elmore Leonard has written a novel that twists and turns to the last page.  From screen tests to rock sessions, from the Hills and the Valley to Hollywood and Vine, Be Cool is all new, all clever and, most definitely, all that.