Vickery and Castine Books in Order

The Vickery and Castine novels take Tim Powers's long standing fascination with ghosts and secret histories and bolt it onto the on ramps and underpasses of present day Los Angeles. The series starts with Alternate Routes, then continues in Forced Perspectives and Stolen Skies, following former federal agent Sebastian Vickery and government employee Ingrid Castine as they discover just how thin the border is between the living and the dead.

In Alternate Routes Vickery makes a precarious living as a driver for a covert car service that ferries sensitive clients along routes that dodge the spectral turbulence on the freeways. Phantom cars, unmarked exits, and glimpses of a desolate highway called the Labyrinth hint that traffic patterns hide something far older and more predatory. When a secret agency decides Vickery knows too much, he and Castine are forced to dive straight into that otherworldly network rather than skirt it, discovering that it has plans of its own for Los Angeles.

Forced Perspectives picks up with the pair on the run and newly sensitized to the echoes of past disasters that cling to city streets. A charismatic tech entrepreneur is trying to weld thousands of restless spirits and living minds into a single artificial god, using buried movie sets, cursed locations, and half forgotten cults as his circuitry. Vickery and Castine's ability to see and interact with ghosts becomes both their edge and their liability as they chase clues from the La Brea Tar Pits to a sunken neighborhood off the coast.

In Stolen Skies the series tilts into UFO lore without losing its haunted freeway core. Vickery stumbles onto a truth about flying saucers that powerful people would rather erase, drawing the attention of American intelligence services and Russian operatives alike. He and Castine are pulled into a dangerous search for an ancient relic tied to an alien presence, crossing the Mojave Desert, cult hangouts in the Hollywood Hills, and strange manifestations along the Los Angeles River.

Taken together, the books read like supernatural thrillers threaded with dry humor and carefully worked out occult mechanics. Powers treats modern conspiracy material, from contactee cults to classified research programs, with the same seriousness he brings to Victorian diaries in his historical novels. New readers can start with any volume, but following Vickery and Castine in order lets you watch their wary partnership turn into a bruised, believable loyalty as the city around them grows steadily stranger.