Chaos Free

Ian Bloom wrote Chaos Free at age 23 in Los Angeles, fresh from New York—post-grad, pre-myth—when the city still felt like an open ledger and every favor carried a hidden rate. Written in heat and velocity, Chaos Free is a screenplay disguised as a novel, or a novel wearing a screenplay's suit, depending on who's holding the gun.

It begins with a horse named Chaos Free and a bet that should have been clean. It becomes a chain reaction: a private investigator contracted into a case that keeps multiplying, a dead girl who isn't dead, a boyfriend drowning in the hole, and an ancient horse-face mask moving through racetracks, museums, airport garages, canyon roads, private planes, and the hollow temples of Hollywood—where stolen art becomes currency and violence becomes administration. Everyone is watching. Everyone is brokered. Every romance is leverage. Even the detective is too smart for his own tricks—until the trick is him.

A noir engine—hard-boiled, lucid, and strange—Chaos Free moves like a case file: silhouette and cigarette, glint and ruin, a bleach-lit freefall that smokes as it falls.