Screwdriver - Hardcover

by Ian Bloom (Author)

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.