Alternate Routes

by Tim Powers Narrated by Bronson Pinchot

Overview

A new novel from award-winning master of fantasy and science fiction Tim Powers. A modern ghost story as only Tim Powers can write it.

Something weird is happening to the Los Angeles freeways—phantom cars, lanes from nowhere, and sometimes unmarked off-ramps that give glimpses of a desolate desert highway—and Sebastian Vickery, disgraced ex-Secret Service agent, is a driver for a covert supernatural-evasion car service. But another government agency is using and perhaps causing the freeway anomalies, and their chief is determined to have Vickery killed because of something he learned years ago at a halted Presidential motorcade.

Reluctantly aided by Ingrid Castine, a member of that agency, and a homeless Mexican boy, and a woman who makes her living costumed as Supergirl on the sidewalk in front of the Chinese Theater, Vickery learns what legendary hell it is that the desert highway leads to—and when Castine deliberately drives into it to save him from capture, he must enter it himself to get her out.

Alternate Routes is a fast-paced supernatural adventure story that sweeps from the sun-blinded streets and labyrinthine freeways of Los Angeles to a horrifying other world out of Greek mythology, and Vickery and Castine must learn to abandon old loyalties and learn loyalty to each other in order to survive as the world goes mad around them.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

06/18/2018
Powers (Medusa’s Web) continues his run of smashing expectations and then playing with the pieces in this entertaining urban fantasy. Former Secret Service agent Sebastian Vickery makes an under-the-radar living driving passengers in cars that protect them from spectral energies flowing around Los Angeles’s freeways. After another agent, Ingrid Castine, saves him from assassination, Vickery discovers that someone exploiting those energies is blurring the boundaries between our physical world and a toxic, irrational landscape called the Labyrinth. Vickery and Castine must seal that rift to keep the Labyrinth from flooding their reality, though doing so will likely mean going into it themselves. Though the turns of the plot seem irrational at times, Powers eventually combines the disparate pieces of Vickery and Castine’s quest to create a solid story. Throw in a unique helper calling itself Mary and clever twists on a favorite Greek myth, and this calculated, frenetic novel ends with hope for redemption born from chaos. Powers’s work is recommended for urban fantasy fans who enjoy more than a dash of the bizarre. (Aug.)

Product Details

BN ID:	2940170618187
Publisher:	Recorded Books, LLC
Publication date:	08/07/2018
Series:	Vickery and Castine , #1
Edition description:	Unabridged
Sales rank:	1,060,576

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