Fourteen-year-old Charlie Mintrose is a young man orphaned under mysterious circumstances. His placement with a new set of foster parents brings him from the crowded home where he lived in downtown Denver to the suburbs north of the city. With the help of his new friends Caleb and Ripley, he becomes involved with a government agency that protects the world from spirits by capturing them in books, and begins to unravel the details of his forgotten past.
As Charlie learns to connect with his new foster parents, he must balance his newfound responsibility with questions of loyalty and reality and hone the power to bind spirits into fiction.