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. Read it like a dossier. Then burn it.