I’m just getting this in before the soon-to-be-released Darren Arronofsky movie starring Austin Butler and Zoe Kravitz. The story revolves around Henry Thompson, a former baseball star whose life has sort of drifted since a broken leg ended his playing days. He works at a seedy bar and lives in a seedier apartment in New York City. One day, he agrees to cat-sit for a neighbor and that sends his life spinning out of control. He’s attacked by two Russians at his bar, leaving him so battered he has to have a kidney removed. He’s kidnapped by two Black cowboys. A group of men break into his apartment, clearly looking for something.
It turns out that Henry’s neighbor is caught up in some nefarious deal, and his associates think he’s run off with something that belongs to them, and that Henry might know about it. When Henry admits that he found a key in his neighbor’s cat carrier, but that he can’t remember where he put it, things start to get even worse. Unable to trust the cops, Henry goes on the run, trying to find the key, figure out what it’s for, and who he can turn to that won’t kill him for it.
Caught Stealing feels a bit like an Elmore Leonard novel, but with a darker tone. That tone eventually became a problem for me. Charlie Huston seems to want the book to have a comedic feel to it, but as the body count mounts to an absurd extent, it became harder to take his attempts at levity. There’s a running bit in the book where Henry, a San Francisco Giants fan, keeps trying to find out the scores of their games and the Mets games because the two teams are competing for a playoff spot. I’m a huge baseball fan, but I think if I were running for my life with a huge pile of corpses in my wake, I might not stop to peruse the sports pages. It seems intended to humanize Henry, but really just makes him look like a sociopath.
Caught Stealing is the first of a six-novel series by Huston. While the novel isn’t a strikeout, I also don’t feel compelled to give him another at-bat.