Fault Lines Books in Order

The Fault Lines books make up a loose modern fantasy trilogy set in Nevada and California, where casinos, freeway motels, and wine country estates sit on top of very old myths. Each novel stands alone, but together Last Call, Expiration Date, and Earthquake Weather trace overlapping stories about luck, ghosts, and the dangerous ways people try to rewrite their own fates.

Last Call is the logical place to begin. Scott Crane, a professional gambler who once briefly reigned as a kind of mystical Fisher King in Las Vegas, is dragged back into the orbit of his estranged father, an occult mobster who uses tarot based rituals to steal bodies and extend his life. The novel links card games, Bugsy Siegel, and the building of the Strip into a secret history of the American West, where every shuffle of the deck can shift who controls the symbolic health of the land.

Expiration Date moves south to early 1990s Los Angeles and swaps cards for ghosts. An eleven year old boy nicknamed Kootie accidentally swallows the spirit of Thomas Edison, while elderly occultists who have been living for decades by literally ingesting ghosts hunt him across the city. The tone is part dark comedy, part chase story, full of oddball mediums, old television sets, and the question of what it means to consume the dead in order to stay alive.

Earthquake Weather pulls threads from both earlier books. Two escapees from a psychiatric hospital, Janis Cordelia Plumtree and Sid Cochran, find themselves at the center of a crisis involving multiple personalities, Californian wine making, and the murdered King of the West whose death has left the region spiritually unmoored. Their road trip up the coast takes in roadside shrines, the Winchester Mystery House, and a Dionysian presence that may not want the king restored.

Across the trilogy Powers uses the language of gambling, addiction, and recovery to talk about inheritance and personal responsibility. Family curses feel like real legal obligations, and the characters who survive are the ones willing to accept some limits instead of grabbing for every possible bit of power. For readers who like contemporary settings, intricate plots, and mythic resonance hiding behind bar lights and freeway signs, the Fault Lines books are a rich, strange ride.