Catchpenny

Novelist and screenwriter Huston (the Joe Pitt Casebooks) introduces thief and mystic Sidney “Sid” Catchpenny in this witty supernatural thriller. Sid is an aging former punk singer and occasional sleuth who can travel through mirrors, and often does so to steal trinkets that help him collect people’s “mojo”—a kind of magical currency. One day, Sid’s friend connects him with the frantic mother of Circe, a missing teen who’s been spending a suspicious amount of time attending a cultish Los Angeles theater club that meets in a barn. The action picks up when, while wearing his dead wife’s favorite Sinead O’Connor T-shirt, Sid finds the exact same image—with the exact same mojo—on the wall in Circe’s bedroom. He then attends a show Circe wrote for her theater group, where he meets her intense friends and the club’s shady director, Bruce, in whom Sid senses a reality-shifting darkness. As Sid digs further into Circe’s disappearance, Huston weaves in story lines about a dangerous video game, a death cult, and the fate of Sid’s long-dead wife, underscoring the antihero’s oft-repeated assertion that “everything is connected.” The resulting caper is fast, fun, and memorable. Agent: Simon Lipskar, Writers House. (Apr.)