Three Days to Never
From AwardAnnals
| Book: | Three Days to Never: A Novel |
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| Author: | Tim Powers |
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| Publisher: | William Morrow & Company |
When twelve-year-old Daphne Marrity takes a videotape labeled Pee-wee’s Big Adventure from her grandmother’s house, neither she nor her college-professor father, Frank Marrity, has any idea that the theft has drawn the attention of both the Israeli Secret Service and an ancient European cabal of occultists—or that within hours they’ll be visited by her long-lost grandfather, who is also desperate to get that tape.
And when Daphne’s teddy bear is stolen, a blind assassin nearly kills Frank, and a phantom begins to speak to her from a switched-off television set, Daphne and her father find themselves caught in the middle of a murderous power struggle that originated long ago in Israel and Germany but now crashes through Los Angeles and out to the Mojave Desert. To survive, they must quickly learn the rules of a dangerous magical chess game and use all their cleverness and courage—as well as their love and loyalty to each other—to escape a fate more profound than death.
A pulse-pounding epic adventure that blurs the lines between espionage and the supernatural; good and evil; past, present and future, Three Days to Never is an exhilarating masterwork of speculative suspense from the always remarkable imagination of the incomparable Tim Powers.
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Reviews
Barnes and Noble
Tim Powers’s Three Days to Never is equal parts time-travel adventure, occultist mystery, and apocalyptic spy thriller. Replete with a virtual cornucopia of thematic elements—Albert Einstein’s secret history, Hebrew mysticism, Israel’s intelligence agency, a lost Charlie Chaplin film, Shakespeare’s The Tempest, etc.—Three Days to Never is (like every other novel Powers has published) a genre-transcending tour de force.
It all begins when Frank Marrity’s eccentric grandmother passes away on Mount Shasta during 1987’s Harmonic Convergence, where thousands of New Agers gathered on mountaintops to meditate and “realign the Earth’s soul.” While searching through a decrepit outbuilding behind her house, Marrity’s 12-year-old daughter, Daphne, discovers a videotape in an old VCR and takes it home, only to discover that it contains a disturbing, symbolism-laden black-and-white film edited by Charlie Chaplin. But before Marrity can even begin to comprehend Daphne’s find, he and his daughter are forced to flee for their lives as two ruthless groups battle to uncover secrets Marrity’s grandmother has kept hidden for decades. Grandma, it turns out, was Albert Einstein’s illegitimate daughter, and the shed in the backyard is much more than it seems
Not unlike previous genre-blending novels by Powers (Last Call, The Anubis Gates, Declare, et al.), the long-awaited Three Days to Never is a thematically intricate, emotionally charged powder keg of a story that will have readers continually surprised—and delighted—throughout. Chock-full of secret societies, bloody gunfights, pedal-to-the-metal car chases, paranormally empowered spies, and prognosticating ghosts, here’s an addictively readable and utterly unique thriller. John le Carré in the fifth dimension. Paul Goat Allen
