Hollywood Tough
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4.2 • 68 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
A Shane Scully Novel by the Bestselling Author of The Tin Collectors and The Viking Funeral
Emmy Award--winning writer-producer Stephen J. Cannell sets his next pulse-pounding thriller in the high-stakes world he knows best---Hollywood! In Hollywood Tough, organized crime attempts to take over the film craft unions.
Detective Shane Scully is back in the good graces of the department, hailed as a hero after bringing down a deadly gang of rogue cops in The Viking Funeral. At a glamorous Hollywood party with his new wife, Alexa, Shane overhears a famous producer make a suspicious remark about the strange deaths of his two ex-wives. Is he serious or merely joking around with his coterie of hangers-on? This becomes more than just police business, because the party is to celebrate the engagement of the producer to Alexa's closest friend.
Against his wife's wishes, Shane begins to look into this heavy-hitter's past. At the same time, he becomes aware of a high-profile wiseguy's attempt to control Hollywood's unions. He initiates an elaborate and expensive sting operation, actually setting up a phony production company to produce a bogus movie at LAPD expense. The plan is to draw the starstruck wiseguy into revealing his real purpose for coming to L.A. But before long the overbudgeted movie is rocketing into production. Tough, streetwise Scully, who thought he'd seen just about everything, is astounded by the distorted egos and total insanity of the movie business, and while he struggles to keep his sting operation from spinning wildly out of control, he and Alexa find themselves and Shane's teenaged son, Chooch, involved in something much bigger than they had ever imagined, something that puts all their lives on the line.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
It's tough to tell the hardened criminals from the corrupt Tinseltown players in Cannell's latest (after The Viking Funeral), an overplotted yet entertaining detective novel that follows L.A. gumshoe Shane Scully and his gorgeous wife, Alexa, as they try to trap a mobster by sponsoring a high-profile movie. The fun starts when Scully runs into a small-time hood he once busted, Nicky Marcella, who is running a film studio that turns out to be a thinly veiled scam to lure beautiful, scantily clad women into phony auditions. But Scully also discovers a link between Marcella and major mob player "Champagne" Dennis Valentine, and after digging around a bit Scully learns that Valentine is making a major push to take over the various low-level Hollywood unions. Scully uses his relationship with Marcella to cozy up to Valentine, then concocts a sting operation to bust the mobster by having the LAPD finance a phony film and catch Valentine in the act. The plotting gets too busy when Cannell introduces a gang war subplot that features Scully's adopted Hispanic son, Cooch, whose efforts to escape gang life fail when his girlfriend is kidnapped during a battle between several gangs over a major heroin shipment. Cannell, creator of such TV shows as The A Team, clearly knows the ins and outs of the entertainment industry, and the detective story, with its wry, subtle humor, doubles as a Hollywood satire. Most of the cops-and-robbers sequences hit the mark as well, and the well-drawn characters and keen observations on the similarities between Hollywood and the mafia make this a winner. Author tour.
Customer Reviews
Great read
Except for the numerous, annoying, errors introduced when the paper version was scanned and poorly cleaned up. One gang is called Ermes half the time and Enes half the time. "The" often appears as "die." The store needs to do a better job editing these or get a digital copy of what was typeset.
Another great one...
I don't have much to say except that this is another great book from him. Worth a read!