Tim Powers is an uncommon literary talent. His exceedingly readable novels, like “Declare,” “The Anubis Gates,” “Expiration Date” and “Earthquake Weather,” are equal parts dark fantasy, spy thriller and historical fiction. Sometimes there’s even a little bit of Peter Straub-style horror thrown in for good measure. If heavenly muses were to put Dean Koontz, John Le Carré and Robert Parker into a creative blender, then molded the mix into a brand new writer, the result would be something akin to Tim Powers.
With “Three Days to Never,” Powers has once again seen fit to cobble up another mind-boggling, heart-stopping, smile-inducing fantasy-thriller.
Powers drops readers right into the thick of things when he begins with Frank and Daphne Marrity rooting through an old shed that belonged to Frank’s grandmother, nicknamed “Grammar,” who raised Frank and Moira Marrity after their father abandoned them and their mother killed herself in a fit of depression.
In the shed, they not only find bars of gold that Frank’s sickly grandmother talked about, they find the original block of cement wherein Charlie Chaplin left imprints of his feet in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theater. (When Chaplin was accused of being a communist, the block was removed.)
Built by Grammar herself, the shed has always seemed magical to Frank – like the time he and his sister noticed their initials, carved into the side of the shed, kept disappearing then reappearing. After his brother-in-law, the officious Bennett, tells Frank and Daphne that Grammar is dead, Frank immediately doubts it because he has recently talked to her on the phone in California – she was supposed to have died 500 miles away, in Oregon.
But Frank discovers letters that lead him to the conclusion Grammar was really Lieserel Maric, the illegitimate daughter of Albert Einstein. And the seemingly harmless videotaped copy of “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure,” which Daphne takes from Grammar’s old shed, holds the secrets of a weapon for which a European cabal is willing to kill. There’s also the matter of Daphne’s recent display of pyrokinetic abilities.
A Shakespeare-quoting father-and-daughter duo who share low-grade psychic powers, a blind female assassin (sporting a Latin first name) who can see with the eyes of anyone standing near her, a former Mossad agent named Lepidopt who, along with a secret team, is on the trail of Frank and Daphne, and a power struggle that dates back to a 20th-century struggle between Germany and Israel – that’s enough detail to pack three different thrillers. Powers makes use of them all in the intense, downhill-race of a story that drives the summer sleeper hit of 2006, “Three Days to Never.”
Dorman T. Shindler is a freelance writer from Kansas City, Mo.
Three Days to Never
By Tim Powers
Morrow, 416 pages, $25.95
