(Also available from Subterranean Press in a limited edition for $80.)

Forget The Da Vinci Code! If you want to plumb the depths of "secret history," then Tim Powers is your man. The World Fantasy Award-winning author of The Anubis Gates, The Stress of Her Regard, Declare, On Stranger Tides, and the Last Call trilogy (all of them classics in their own right) takes you to the mid-Eighties in this wild fantasy thriller.

Secret history (as opposed to alternate history) is the use of historical facts linked by "secret" or unknown connections and motivations. In Stress, we learned the true inspiration for the work of the Romantic poets, Byron Shelley and Keats. In Declare, the Philby spy case blended well with the John Le Carre-style Cold War shenanigans, the fall of the Soviet Union, and the Arabian Nights. There is no Tim Powers novel that will not enthrall with its blend of fact and fantastic fiction, and there seems to be no end of intriguing real-life connections between demonstrably actual world events.

In Three Days to Never, Powers blends Albert Einstein and his estranged daughter, a missing Charlie Chaplin movie, Kaballah-trained Mossad agents, a mysterious deadly group known as the Vespers, astral projection, pyrokinesis, time travel, dybbuks, and a magical Baphomet head, into a potent concoction. When widower Frank Marrity and his precocious daughter Daphne learn about the death of Frank's grandmother, they are catapulted into a madcap search for a device Einstein invented and his daughter later perfected, a device the quirky scientist chose to suppress. But now opposing groups will stop at nothing (including human sacrifice) and use any weapon at their disposal (including a beautiful and blind psychic assassin) to locate the device. Strange magic is in the air as various planes of existence intersect around Frank and Daphne, who also share an unusual psychic bond.

The tone and pace here are noticeably zippier than in Declare, which reached an unusual level of depth and included painstakingly detailed research on every one of its main subjects, making the novel almost as convincing as a biography while still retaining the wild fantastic elements. The book was hefty, carrying enormous weight not only of paper, but of obscure facts and detailed chronology. Three Days to Never, while still engaging the senses and the imagination, moves at a faster clip and plays almost cinematically with its material. In fact, it's not difficult to imagine the novel as a screenplay, though who would be best suited to direct it is still a Powers fan's most stimulating debate (many think Terry Gilliam).

None of this is criticism, for after a singularly long and layered work like Declare, Three Days to Never tends to intoxicate with its head-spinning speed and its mind-blowing events. Here you have temporal paradoxes, ghostly intervention in everyday life, religious connotations, intelligence agents well-versed in the black arts and various forms of magic, and the occasional humorous invention, such as song snippets used to signal radio frequency jumps.

The 1987 Harmonic Convergence forms an appropriate backdrop for this winning, fast-moving fantasy that once again proves Tim Powers is the master of "steampunk," secret history, and his own form of Euro-based magic realism. A novel like this lingers long after the last page is turned simply because it makes such a convincing case for "more on heaven and earth, Horatio, than is dreamt of in your philosophy." Any Tim Powers novel will forevermore change your perception of fantasy, immensely for the better. And Three Days to Never is the perfect place to start if you're behind.