The opening scene, where Chili Palmer is having lunch with a man who ends up getting shot by a hitman, is pretty good. But don't expect the story to be about that crime. There are vague murmurings about possible connections with the Russian mafia but by and large the scene is nothing more than a hook to get you into the story, then forgotten about soon after. This book is a lot like Get Shorty except that it's about a singer instead of a laundromat owner. The whole "let's describe what's really happening as if we're making a movie" thing comes back full force, and it gets a little old. There's even the formerly evil thug that has a change of heart and saves the day, just like in the last one. My suggestion would be to read either Get Shorty or Be Cool, but not both. The story just isn't good enough to be read twice in a row. ( )

Here there be spoilers.

I guess my idea of fast-paced and snappy dialogue is different from other people’s because this didn’t snap, crackle or pop for me. It was mildly entertaining, but not riveting or suspenseful.

At the beginning, Chili is having lunch w/some record exec guy that he knows. Just how well is debatable. The guy is shot to death while Chili is away from the table. Chili saw the guy who did it as he returns to the table. It’s a Russian mob guy. It seems the now deceased record exec refused to pay protection money, so he bought it.

Now Chili has an idea for a movie and he wants to open with this scene. He finds the ‘leggy blonde’ in a dating service and she wants to be a singer. The problem is she’s with this group and they have a sleazy manager. Chili knows the ‘partner’ of this manager and he proceeds to get this girl back together with her old band so they can begin recording a CD and shopping a deal.

Some unknown Russian is then killed in Chili’s house. The Russian was there to kill Chili when another guy shows up also to kill Chili. The second guy pops the first guy and reports back to the sleazy manager that everything is taken care of. Now Chili has to find out how many people exactly want to kill him and try to figure out how to stay alive. He ends up turning some hard-core rappers onto the Russians by telling them that they cheated the original record exec out of money that was actually their royalty payments. A bloodbath ensues.

In the end, the sleazy manager gets thrown off a building by his bodyguard (because the sleazy manager tried to erase messages from Chili about the bodyguard’s screen test) and the Russians are all dead. The girl and the band begin to make it and decide not to sign with Chili’s record company because he changed their music in the studio and didn’t tell her about it until some DJ played it for her live on the air.

Chili Palmer is the coolest man on the planet, in real life someone would have put a bullet through him by the end of chapter one of Get Shorty. In the world Leonard conjures up, he is the man who can go into the music business on a whim, play Gangsta Rappers against the Russian Mafia, play a wannabe hoodlum band manager against his gay Samoan bodyguard. While he's doing all this he has time to turn down a couple of girls and sleep with a movie executive.

I love Leonard's writing, he writes great dialogue, not just spoken dialogue, but the internal stuff, including the stage directions we all walk around giving ourselves. ( )

Fun, quick read. ( )

I loved Get Shorty - the book and the film. This follow-up is pretty weak in comparison. It seemed pretty evident to me that the normally astute Leonard knows nothing about how the music industry works, or about popular music. ( )