The L.A. sleaze of Ellroy and Chandler's novels may be lily-white, but the sleaze of real L.A. crosses all boundaries of race and color. John Ridley's Everybody Smokes In Hell takes the twists, turns, and coincidences of a classic thriller and applies them to a multicultural world. But the result is far more Tarantino than Chandler: It's hip-hop noir. Everybody Smokes In Hell is a dark parody of the back-stabbing entertainment industry, in which drug dealers are equated with executives and greedy accumulation of wealth by all means necessary is the ever-present goal. The book is full of improbable but not impossible plot devices: Paris, a convenience-store-register worker, steals a DAT containing the last songs of a Kurt Cobain-esque doomed rock star. At the same time, his wayward roommate Buddy finds himself holding a fortune in heroin. Both become the targets of their respective pursuers, one a drug dealer, the other a drugged-up record executive. As often happens in wrong place/wrong time scenarios, wires get crossed, messages are mixed, and Paris ends up fleeing a sadistic nymphomaniac hit woman. Ridiculous? Knowingly so. Sharp? Sometimes. Yet Ridley, like too many writers, pushes the satire way over the top. As the bodies pile up and it becomes clear that few, if any, are going to get out of the mess alive, it becomes difficult to care for characters cast from the start in such an unsympathetic light. Ridley plays the violence for laughter—not surprising for a former stand-up comedian and sitcom writer—but more often he seems to use violence as little more than a set-up for his punchlines. If Everybody Smokes In Hell were funnier, the sleaze would probably be more satisfying, but Ridley's book loses its flavor quickly. It's a popcorn read begging to be bought up by the very industry it casually mocks.