In the Night of the Heat. This book was written by Steven Barnes and his wife Tananarive Due with creative inspiration and some input by the actor Blair Underwood.

It's the second in a series but it can be enjoyed as a stand-alone. It's a retelling of the OJ Simpson story. It features the writers' fallen hero, Tennyson Hardwick, one time ladies man, struggling actor, and informal private investigator/martial arts enthusiast. Hardwick turns down the request of an old girlfriend to help protect her cousin, the recently acquitted football star TD Jackson, from murder threats. Shortly afterwards TD Jackson is found dead from apparent suicide. Hardwick gets drawn into the case, much to the displeasure of the LAPD, and other more sinister parties.

Barnes lives in LA and also works in the entertainment industry. Barnes has said that he thought OJ was guilty as hell and that if he did have any hearsay inside information about how OJ would have committed the crime and gotten away with it, a mystery novel certainly would be the place he'd put it. So that part was fun. It was also fun trying to pick out the book sections that were written by Barnes and the ones written by Due. Both writers have pretty distinctive tones but do a good job at making the shifts in the book close to seamless. There's a lot of backstory about how Hollywood really works from the POV of disposable actors or writers. Thinly veiled versions of Farrah Fawcett and Bruce Willis have cameos. YMMV on that stuff.

Barnes & Due do a good job of making the violence work as part of the story. My only quibble was that I think that for this book Barnes & Due may have slightly underestimated their readers' intelligence. There's a few "Scooby Doo" moments where some antagonists seem possessed to explain everything that took place so a particularly dim reader won't miss anything. That was unusual coming from these two but this is clearly their attempt to write for a more commercial market and appears to have paid off. That aside, this was fun reading.