Screwdriver

Ian Bloom wrote Screwdriver at age 23 between the Hamptons and the Lower East Side—drug-fueled paradise, shotgun-loaded with whiskey, skateboarding, gargantuan canvas painting, and acting school—while politely passing on a white-shoe banking desk and the slow death that comes with it. He finished the novel in Los Angeles, carving a path to Hollywood. Screwdriver is a massively flammable Big Lebowski × American Psycho × Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas spectacle—an engine of speed, leverage, and vice—bursting through the maelstrom of Hollywood, Wall Street, and the Art World.

At the center is Jean Barry—a beautiful wreck with perfect manners—an art dealer–fixer turned who moves through Los Angeles like a loaded weapon: cigarettes, convertibles, backroom meetings, and black-bag favors. When a single job goes sideways, Jean is pulled into a labyrinth where deal-flow becomes seduction, sex becomes leverage, and every room has a watcher—studios, hedge-fund heirs, dealers, escorts, gamblers, and the dead-eyed operatives who keep the machine quiet. Screwdriver plays like a noir carnival under floodlights: a chase through money, image, and appetite, where the only rule is momentum—and the cost of staying alive is learning what to trade.