SAME DIFFERENCE

Copperman, creator of a host of offbeat protagonists, continues his trademark zaniness.

Brian Hennessey’s plea to find his missing daughter provides detective Fran Stein with a refreshing twist on her usual meat-and-potatoes cases helping adopted adults find their birth parents. Fran and her brother, Ken, know firsthand the longing to connect with genetic forebears, since they have no biological parents. A pair of geneticists created them in their lab before leaving them to be raised by their “Aunt Margie,” a radio news reporter who somehow got wind of their little experiment. Mad scientists Brad and Livvie have long since vanished, chased by some unspecified threat to their and their unorthodox progeny’s lives. Fran feels a bond with the missing Eliza Hennessey because Eliza recently came out as a transgender woman. The detective can sympathize with someone who has trouble letting people know she’s finally her true self, rather than whoever they thought she was—since Fran’s recent attempt to share her secret with her kinda-sorta boyfriend, NYPD Det. Richard Mankiewicz, ended in disaster. But once Fran tracks Eliza down through her enrollment in New Amsterdam University, that bond gets strained. Eliza turns out to be a moody, pouty teenager with plenty of troubles, like the corpse of one of her boyfriends, Damien Van Dorn, in the basement of a Bronx apartment building. Soon Fran and Eliza are on the run, and it takes every bit of Ken’s ingenuity to shield them from Damien’s killers, the police, and anyone else in New York who can use electronic data to track a willful teen who won’t put down her cellphone.

A hilarious quest.