Last Call

In 1969 Scott Crane, a young professional card player, sat down to a strange game of poker on a houseboat on Lake Mead, a game played with a Tarot deck and called Assumption. He thought he won. Twenty years later, around Easter 1989, he is a grieving widower troubled by nightmares of that night, and he learns that the game never ended. The man who ran it was his own father, Georges Leon, a gambler, mobster and occultist who killed Bugsy Siegel decades earlier to take over his operation and his place as the Fisher King, the wounded king of the Grail legend, here ruling from Las Vegas. Leon cheats death by stealing and possessing the bodies of the living. What Scott staked in 1969, without knowing it, was his own body and soul, and Leon means to collect.

Scott was raised not by Leon but by Ozzie Crane, an old professional gambler who took him in, alongside Diana, a girl Ozzie also raised, who is now a mother herself and a target too. With them, and with his loyal friend Arky Mavranos, who is sick with cancer and hoping for a cure, Scott heads back into the desert, pursued by Leon's people and by others who believe Scott will become the next Fisher King. Ozzie does not survive the journey. It ends with Scott playing Assumption against his father a second time. Afterward he takes up the crown himself and marries Diana, whose children he will raise as his own.

Powers works in the form known as secret history: he keeps every recorded fact about Siegel and the building of Las Vegas and supplies a hidden, magical reason behind it, with T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land running underneath. The book is long, dense and slow to explain its rules, and readers with no feeling for cards may find the poker hard going. Publishers Weekly called it "a difficult, but distinctive and commanding novel." Readers of Neil Gaiman's American Gods, which works a similar idea, will find here a Las Vegas nobody else has written.