Fault Lines

3 primary works

Last Call

by Tim Powers

Published 1 April 1992

Twenty years ago Scott Crane abandoned his career as a professional poker player and went into hiding, after a weird high-stakes game played with Tarot cards. But now the cards - and the supernatural powers behind them - have found him again.

Crane's father killed gangster Bugsy Siegel in 1948 to become the Fisher King, and to keep that power he is determined to kill his son. Now Scott Crane must cross the Mojave Desert to his father's Perilous Chapel in Las Vegas, and take up the cards again for one last poker duel. And the stakes are the highest he's ever played for ... his soul.

Expiration Date

by Tim Powers

Published 20 March 1995

Ghosts can be caught, and bottled, and sold by covert dealers to addictswho inhale the things—and when a young boy named Kootie accidentallyinhales the ghost of Thomas Edison, he finds that all the factions of LosAngeles' occult underground are after him, determined to kill him and getEdison's powerful ghost for themselves.
Aided by Edison's confused andirascible ghost, Kootie flees—and finds himself dodging perils naturaland
supernatural in the gritty alleys and trainyards of a Los Angeles thattourists never see.
Fromm the slums around the L.A. River, to the abandonedHoudini mansion in the Hollywood Hills, to a final
dramatic confrontation onthe haunted ocean liner Queen Mary docked in Long Beach, Expiration Date isa
heart-stopping supernatural adventure from one of fantasy fiction's mostoriginal talents.

Earthquake Weather

by Tim Powers

Published 3 July 1997

The magical King of the West has been killed in California, and his assassin is one of the multiple personalities in the head of Janis Cordelia Plumtree—but which one?One of them is a streetwise pickpocket. Another is dead, and can only speak in quotes from Shakespeare. And another seems to be the unquiet ghost of her father. And there are many others.Sid Cochran is a one-time winemaker who blames his wife's suicide on the wine-god Dionysus, and believes that Dionysus is now pursuing him.Cochran and Plumtree escape together from a mental hospital in Los Angeles, and—pursued by ghosts, gangsters, and a crazy psychiatrist—set out for San Francisco and the wine country to try to restore the dead King of the West to life.But the god Dionysus himself is a player in this perilous game—and not on their side.About Tim Powers:"Powers writes in a clean, elegant style that illuminates without slowing down the tale. . . . [He] promises marvels and horrors, and delivers them all."—Orson Scott Card"Other writers tell tales of magic in the twentieth century, but no one does it like Powers."—The Orlando Sentinel". . .  immensely clever stuff.... Powers' prose is often vivid and arresting . . . All in all, Powers' unique voice in science fiction continues to grow stronger.”—Washington Post Book World“Powers is at heart a storyteller, and ruthlessly shapes his material into narrative form.”—The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction“On Stranger Tides . . . immediately hooks you and drags you along in sympathy with one central character's appalling misfortunes on the Spanish Main, [and] escalates from there to closing mega-thrills so determinedly spiced that your palate is left almost jaded."—David Langford"On Stranger Tides . . . was the inspiration for Monkey Island. If you read this book you can really see where Guybrush and LeChuck were -plagiarized- derived from, plus the heavy influence of voodoo in the game. . . .  [the book] had a lot of what made fantasy interesting . . .”—legendary game designer Ron Gilbert“Powers's strengths [are] his originality, his action-crammed plots, and his ventures into the mysterious, dark, and supernatural.” Los Angeles Times Book Review"[Powers’ work delivers] an intense and intimate sense of period or realization of milieu; taut plotting, with human development and destiny . . . and, looming above all, an awareness of history itself as a merciless turning of supernatural wheels. . . . Powers' descriptions . . . are breathtaking, sublimely precise . . . his status as one of fantasy's major stylists can no longer be in doubt.”—SF Site"Powers creates a mystical, magical otherworld superimposed on our own and takes us on a marvelous, guided tour of his vision."—Science Fiction Chronicle"The fantasy novels of Tim Powers are nothing if not ambitious . . .  Meticulously researched and intellectually adventurous, his novels rarely fail to be strange and wholly original."—San Francisco Chronicle