Billy Castle serves drinks to men who will never know his name-a Queens kid keeping his head down, supporting an alcoholic mother, and doing everything he can to avoid the legacy of his father, a small-time gangster whose shadow still clings to him. Dean Willis chases ghosts in a city that's already forgotten them. And Archer Stone-magnetic, ruthless, and more myth than man-has built an empire on the principle that America's debts are never paid, only inherited.

When Billy witnesses a murder in the loading dock of the exclusive Palace nightclub, he's pulled into a world his family has orbited for generations: a New York that stretches from the glittering towers of Manhattan to the raw edges of Queens and the Bronx, where power moves through bloodlines, where violence is a language passed from father to son, and where the machinery of the American dream runs on bodies like his. Across the city, federal agent Dean Willis-hollowed by loss, drowning in drink, and chasing a man who feels less like a criminal than a ghost of the nation itself-finds himself drawn into the same orbit.

As their paths converge, Made in America becomes a reckoning with the stories a nation tells itself. A novel about inheritance-of trauma, of class, of the myths we build to survive-and what happens when those myths collapse. Sprawling yet intimate, brutal yet tender, it's a literary crime epic steeped in Greek tragedy, told through an ensemble of lives bound by ambition and ruin, exposing how power endures through institutions, bloodlines, and myth-and the cost borne by those beneath it. Jack Chase has written an American tragedy for the present moment: brutal, hypnotic, and impossible to forget.

For readers of Cormac McCarthy, Don DeLillo, and Denis Johnson, Made in America is a modern epic about the machinery of power and the quiet violence of inheritance.