Expiration Date - Softcover

"Powers writes action and adventure that Indiana Jones could only dream of."--"The Washington Post" ""Expiration Date" is a minefield of exploding surprises that will have readers convinced that the author has tapped into a more magical reality behind everyday life."--"Publishers Weekly" ""Expiration Date" is fascinating...It'll have you turning pages as much for its sheer inventiveness as for the plot....for the remarkable frisson that sparks from the page, the playfulness of the language."--Charles de Lint, "The M"agazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction

Powers has created a strange and wonderful Los Angeles in which to set this novel: a city full of ghosts - and full, too, of unpleasant characters who extend their lives and enhance their power by catching and absorbing the ghosts of the recently dead. Young Koot Parganas is growing up in Los Angeles in the 1990's, but his parents won't let him do anything normal. His weirdo parents venerate the spirits of dead Mahatmas. At the age of eleven, Koot has disobeyed his parents, broken into a plaster bust of Dante, stolen the small glass vial concealed inside it, and set in motion events that will change his own life, and everyone else's. For trapped in the vial was the preserved ghost of Thomas Alva Edison, and there is no telling what power the possession of that ghost could confer. The exposure of Edison's ghost lights up a beacon for those who can see such things. Koot is pursued through the dark underside of the city, aided by allies as strange as his enemies: a bum and his dog; a man concealed by the ghostly mask of Houdini; a psychiatrist sorceress; and a former television child-star who has been dead for several years, but who is not yet ready to leave his body of abandon his revenge on the woman who murdered his godfather.