Last Call

Scott Crane is a professional gambler and grieving widower adrift between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, a man whose luck has always felt borrowed rather than earned. Years earlier his estranged father, the occultist and mobster Georges Leon, attempted a dark ritual on the boy, an act his mother interrupted at terrible cost, and the unfinished business of that night has quietly shaped every hand Scott has played since. Now, as Leon works a Tarot-based sorcery that lets a magician pour his consciousness into another body and so cheat death, Scott discovers that a game he once won has made him a stake others mean to collect. Powers, whose gift is for grounding the numinous in verifiable history, threads the legend of the Fisher King and Eliot's The Waste Land through the real story of Bugsy Siegel and the building of the Vegas Strip, so that the desert itself reads as a wounded kingdom awaiting its heir. Helped by his foster father Ozzie and foster sister Diana, Scott must decide what he owes the dead. It is a novel about inheritance, the fathers we flee, and the buried price of everything won at the table.