Chaos Theory

Amazon.com
We all had those terrible nights in high school. We borrowed dad's car, and instead of rushing home to meet curfew, decided to indulge in a little mischief: party-hopping, drag-racing on a deserted road, or drinking beer during an impromptu "sleepover." But what if the little violation of parental trust turned into something much worse? What if somebody died during that joy ride? What if the events of that one night changed your life forever?

In Gary Krist's Chaos Theory, two college-bound high school students watch an evening on the town turn into the nightmare of a lifetime. Jason Rourke and Dennis Monroe are smart and respectable boys from a suburban Washington D.C. neighborhood. Jason is white and Dennis is black, and their occasional discomfort over racial identity sometimes leads them to a bit of posing. One Sunday night, Dennis, pretending an urban sophistication, convinces Jason that they should head to the seedy side of D.C. to score some marijuana. Their black Audi is an easy target for the dealer, who attempts to reach into the car and grab the boys. They flee the scene, dragging the man behind the car for a moment before his arm snaps, shots are fired, and he falls into the road. The boys return home, their hearts pounding, feeling fortunate to have escaped injury. But the next morning's paper reports that the man they escaped is now dead. And their failed petty crime inadvertently involves them in a mess of city politics when the dealer turns out to be a police officer in disguise.

ANNOTATION

A thriller featuring two college youths on the run from mobsters. The story begins when they leave a party in Washington to buy drugs. The dealer pulls a gun, thinking they, too, are dealers and the youths accidentally cause his death. One youth is white, the other black.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"Krist reminds us of how much fun reading can be."
—The New York Times

Chaos Theory is a shrewd, literate, and compulsively readable thriller set against the background of Washington, D.C., in the mid-1990s—a city on the brink of economic, social, and moral collapse.

Jason Rourke, who is white, and Dennis Monroe, who is black, are good kids and good friends. One night, on a dare, they drive to a blighted part of Washington to buy a little marijuana. But it isn't their night, and the deal goes terribly wrong. Before it's over, a shot is fired, and the two just barely get away, leaving a small-time drug dealer lying wounded in the street.

Their troubles are only beginning. The next morning, Jason and Dennis learn that the incident with the drug dealer was far worse than it seemed. Finding themselves suspects in a bizarre homicide, the two are forced to flee, leaving their families terrified and confused. And what started out as a relatively innocent moment of adolescent mischief soon turns into a nightmarish, life-threatening ordeal, one that eventually draws these sheltered teenagers into a citywide scheme of murders and cover-ups that may involve some of Washington's most prominent—and most trusted—public officials.

Gary Krist's first thriller, Bad Chemistry, was praised for its sharp intelligence and its deft and deep characterizations. Here he broadens his canvas, creating a drama that explores the thoughts and feelings of two families who suddenly find their lives spiraling out of control. The result is a sophisticated novel of suspense, one that takes us deep into the decay and corruption of a citytottering on the edge of chaos.

FROM THE CRITICS

Ann Prichard - USA Today

Chaos Theroy combines corruption and kids dodging killers in a Grisham-like thriller that shares elements with The Client and The Street Lawyers but outshines both.

Jonathan Miles - Salon

There's precious little breathing room in Chaos Theory, Gary Krist's second thriller. The novel's breakneck action sequences -- foot chases, car chases, even dune-buggy chases -- tumble into one another like flotsam in a flood current, banging about in the froth. New dangers lurk at the bottom of every page, and there's nary a spot to be found for either reader or character to breathe a quiet sigh. It's a tight, dizzying if not altogether memorable read -- a swift and sleek whoosh of adrenaline for those nights when you don't give a damn what time the alarm is set for in the morning.

The title, of course, refers to the meteorologist Edward Lorenz's 1961 promulgation of what is commonly called the "butterfly effect": the theory that the flapping of a single butterfly's wing effects a divergence in the state of the atmosphere that, however minute, can ultimately produce a tornado in Kansas, say, or a monsoon in Indonesia.

In Krist's novel, the butterfly's flapping is a flip decision a pair of high school boys make on a chilly Sunday evening in Washington. The two of them -- one black, the other white and both clean-cut and levelheaded -- decide to score a joint downtown. The dealer who steps from an alleyway toward their car frightens them; he's jumpy and frazzled, not to mention armed with a small pistol. When the boys try to back out, the deal goes fully sour: A shot is fired, and in wrestling away the dealer's gun as their car drags him down the street the boys accidentally ram him, "with a sickening thud," into the back of a parked car.

At this juncture, however, the tornado hasn't even begun gaining speed. As it turns out, the dealer was an undercover cop, and it isn't long before other cops start sniffing out the black Audi with the hastily concealed bullet hole in the floorboards. But wait -- the undercover cop's picture on the nightly news doesn't match the face of the man the boys thudded into the parked car. Moreover, the cop, say the news reports, was shot -- and set on fire. Thus the tornado starts its swirl: With one minor act of recklessness, the two boys unwittingly unpeel a macabre and multi-faceted kidnapping and killing operation.

The action takes place circa Marion Barry's last mayoral term, when Washington had to be turned over to a federal control board, and in Krist's hands the tumultuous city, loosely fictionalized, plays a character itself -- a malevolent and malignant presence shambling about the story's corners. It's Fritz Lang's metropolis as described, perhaps, by Bruce Springsteen: They continued north for a while longer, the streets turning shabbier and grimmer as they drove. They passed a weed-choked lot, the loading dock of a sheet-metal works, and then an abandoned gas station, the blackened, burned-out shells of its gas pumps lined up like headstones in a cemetery. This is the city you live in, Jason told himself.

Throughout the book, nonetheless, lie the skid marks of what could have been deeper treatments of character. Krist's cast is far more human than the genre's typical line-ups, and he makes brief if occasionally effective forays into topics like troubled father-son relationships, racial politics and friendship; but the pace rarely slows enough for any substantial mining of character.

Moreover, Krist's efforts are too often betrayed by sentences that fall thuddingly flat, like belly flops into a shallow pool. ("She would be trouble, of course -- this bone-thin, neurotic, chain-smoking, scotch-guzzling white woman. Maybe more trouble than he wanted right now.") But then, with the sentences flying by so quickly in a plot-throttled blur, you don't especially care -- it's a thriller and it's thrilling, a rocketing and relentless literary carnival ride.

Newsday

Chaos Theory stirs up real terror.

Chicago Tribune

Suspenseful plot twists...will keep almost anybody turning the pages...stunning...riveting.

USA Today