Catchpenny Published by Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group on April 9, 2024 Genres: FICTION / Fantasy / Urban, Fiction / Mystery & Detective / Amateur Sleuth, Fiction / Thrillers / Supernatural
Pages: 416
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Goodreads
A thief who can travel through mirrors, a video game that threatens to spill out of the virtual world, a doomsday cult on a collision course with destiny, and a missing teenager at the center of it all. With the world on the brink of every kind of apocalypse, humanity needs a hero. What it gets is Sid Catchpenny.
"I absolutely loved it. Catchpenny is a brilliant book, full of heart and the language is pitch-perfect. If Elmore Leonard had ever written a fantasy novel, this would be it.” —Stephen King
Sidney Catchpenny has had a bad run. Laid low by a years-long bout of debilitating depression, he’s all but squandered his reputation as one of the most uniquely talented thieves in LA. There aren’t many who can do what Sid does. He’s a sly, a special kind of crook with the uncanny ability to move through mirrors. And the spoils he’s after are equally unusual. Forget jewels and cold cash—Sid steals curiosities—items imbued with powerful mojo, a magical essence gleaned from the accumulated emotion that seeps into interesting, though often banal objects. That spot on the carpet where your old dog used to lay at your feet? The passed-down family heirloom nobody wants but everybody refuses to throw away? These curiosities are full of mojo, which is both the currency of the criminal underground and the secret source of magic in the world.
When a friend from Sid’s past comes looking for his help with an important client, and the chance to pay off old debts presents itself, Sid seizes the opportunity … as best he can. But the case he stumbles into is more complicated than it seems, and it portends a seismic shift in the world, one that will leave no one untouched. As the fog of his depression begins to lift, Sid sees connections everywhere he looks, and the once disparate threads of the case—a missing teenage girl, an entire bedroom saturated with mojo, and Sid’s own long-dead wife—begin to coalesce.
Review:
Let me start this review by saying this is my first Charlie Huston book, and it was a fascinating read. I have never read a book where you have a magic system based on mojo, you can travel through mirrors, and that mojo magic can be coursed to one person. I also like to point out that there are rules to this mojo magic but no rules, which I take to mean things are constantly in flux, and you learn how mojo works as the world involves. A huge crux that the characters have an ax to grind is how much mojo the internet is sucking, and there is no way to access yourself or is there. This author took a concept and ran with it, and though at times I was baffled about where things were going, I was expecting a hunt for a missing child, which we got, but how she went missing and why I did not. Catchpenny is just one of those novels you must pick up, allowing you to see how you feel when you come out the other side. Also, don’t try to make it make sense. As I said, there are no rules but rules, and what you expect to happen probably won’t happen.
About Charlie Huston
Charlie Huston is an American author of Noircrime fiction. However, according to a recent interview with Paradigm, he prefers to be classified as a writer of Pulp, due to how he writes.
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