Three Days to Never

Three Days to Never, by Tim Powers. I occasionally imagine that, if I knew a lot more and researched a lot more, I might be able to write the sort of urban fantasy books that Tim Powers writes. But I'd rather read his.

In Three Days to Never, Einstein worked out a mystical form of time travel. The protagonists don't know what they have; but the Mossad is trying to get hold of it, so is a shadowy group of occultists called the Vespers, and so is the protagonist's long lost father, who turns out to have been murdered.

If you haven't read Powers, this might not be the best one to start with--I enjoyed On Stranger Tide more, although that may simply be due to the historical period it was set in--but it's certainly worth reading. Not a "can't put it down till I'm done", more of a "read till 1am, then put it down."

Powers' works remind me of some of the later Saberhagen Dracula books--not for the subject, but in the general feel.

Another book, which I'm not reading, is Space Captain Smith, by Toby Frost. The omission of an Amazon link is deliberate. Page two has something along the lines of "I intend to take a mettle at them, and show them my crack! Except the other way around." Hilarious. I kept reading, solely because I was stuck in the car for three hours with no other books available. A couple pages later we find an engineer telling Captain Smith that his ship has an android pilot, "female, so of course it can't read a map or use reverse properly." That was about the point where I dug the car's owner manual out of the glove compartment and read that instead.