Last Call Audiobook By Tim Powers cover art

Last Call

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Last Call

By: Tim Powers
Narrated by: Bronson Pinchot
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Scott Crane abandoned his career as a professional poker player 20 years ago and hasn’t returned to Las Vegas, or held a hand of cards, in 10 years. But troubling nightmares about a strange poker game he once attended on a houseboat on Lake Mead are drawing him back to the magical city. For the mythic game he believed he won did not end that night in 1969—and the price of his winnings was his soul. Now, a pot far more strange and perilous than he ever could imagine depends on the turning of a card.

Enchantingly dark and compellingly real, this World Fantasy Award–winning novel is a masterpiece of magic realism set in the gritty, dazzling underworld known as Las Vegas.

.©1992 Tim Powers (P)2010 Blackstone Audio, Inc. Classics Fantasy Horror

Critic reviews

“A dizzying, stimulating magnum opus.” ( USA Today)
“Brilliant! Compelling and satisfying! Tim Powers is one of our best writers, and Last Call is his best book yet.” (Raymond E. Feist)
“Distinctive and commanding…a strikingly inventive novel.” ( Publishers Weekly)
Fascinating Mythology • Intriguing Plotline • Captivating Narration • Gripping Story • Clever Worldbuilding
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Bronson Pinchot does a solid job reading one of my favorite authors. The story can be a bit confusing with its broad cast of characters. It’s an excellent mixture of fact & myth, creating a strange world existing just on the borders of our reality.

Myth & Reality Collide For an Excellent Tall Tale

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I would listen to Bronson Pinchot read the phone book. He is the best. Interesting story, different from what I expected which is always welcome.

Going for sequel!

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Tim Powers what a unique writer. His stories are unlike any thing else. I loved Anubis Gates as do most people who know Tim Powers. I finally got around to checking this out, alot said its similar tp American Gods, it is somewhat. But not really Tim fills you with a sense of urgency where Gaiman fills you with whimsy. Tims characters are real and you feel their despair, their decline, their triumphs. The reader, well Pinchot is one of those readers that is simultaneously brilliant and completely frustrating at the same time. His tone and range are great for certain parts, but his pacing and generic narrator voice will leave you hitting the rewind button quite a bit. This is one I wish I would have bought the book and read instead.

Great Great Great Story!

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I have been debating writing this because I wasn't sure I could add anything worth knowing about the book in my review! But I will try in the spirit of "sometimes anything is better than nothing at all". Here it goes:
It was a good book but not near as good to me as one of my all time favorite books by any writer "On stranger tides". It is interesting with lots of good characters but a little too much bad language for my taste. The reader did a great job and I even think he fit this book better than "On stranger tides". The story seems to be well thought out and you will need a pretty good memory to remember who is who through out the book. You have no need to like gambling (I dont) to like the book but gambling is a huge part of the story but it is not gambling quiet like any of us has ever tried or ever will! I wont say anymore about that so as to not give away too much. I consider Powers to be a very talented and smart writer and I think the reader may need plenty of the latter to enjoy his books to there fullest.

A good book!

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I love this book and have read it multiple times in the past 20+ years but this is the first time I've listened to it. Bronson Pinchot does a good job overall but there are a couple of characterizations that just don't work for me, where he was too far off the sense of the character in my own head. I figure this is the risk when you listen to a well-known and well-beloved book and probably will impact very few other listeners.

A pretty good reading overall

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Tim Powers is neither sci-fi nor fantasy (at least no in any conventional sense), he writes very interesting stories where impossible things happen. In Last Call, he's mixing cold war spy stories with old school middle eastern mythology, and pulls it off brilliantly. Pinchot would not be my first choice for this book but he does a very good job.

Powers Rocks

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Loved the twists and turns in this story. Powers built a rich and deep mythology. The characters are rich and interesting and the flow of the story satisfying.

Clever plot and world building

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Bugsy Siegel was once the Fisher King - and Powers may well have you believing it. This is classic Powers, gloriously stirring doses of mostly-real history into mostly-real mythology with thoroughly real characters, mixing up a dark, dizzying draft which - pretty literally - reaches both the lowest depths and the highest potentials of the human spirit. Not for the faint of heart, this tour-de-force is a brilliantly executed voyage of intensely personal, not-the-kind-you-think, damnations and redemptions.

Pinchot is a narrator whose delivery and characterizations I've criticized sharply and often: so when I say that in this work he's damn near perfect, that's no mere enthusiasm. He's well suited to the work; and if he can't pronounce some firearms terminology, well, he *can* pronounce French and Latin, and in this book there are a few places where that's quite a bit more to the point.

Obsession, Las Vegas History, & the Fisher King

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When your mother warned you not to play poker with Tarot cards, this is exactly what she was afraid of. Typical Tim Powers weirdness accompanies this extraordinary novel populated with ordinary people in the most strangely supernatural circumstances. This novel has a lot of common elements with Powers’ later novel THREE DAYS TO NEVER: set in an earlier decade of Americana, where cigarettes are smoked in every public gathering, characters changing bodies to prolong their weary existence, alcohol used to alter the connection to the spirit realm, but here in LAST CALL it all has an unforced harmony that is lacking in the later book. As in most Powers novels the story gets very complicated as we get to know the characters and then begins to come together as it approaches the climax, feeling somehow like an inevitable force of nature.

Bronson Pinchot has very good voices for all the quirky people and sometimes goes over the top as is required by the story. He helps make this a very entertaining audiobook.

Don’t Let Anyone Make Any Assumptions

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Would you consider the audio edition of Last Call to be better than the print version?

Having read the print version twice, I would recommend it over the audio version.

What was one of the most memorable moments of Last Call?

The final show-down on Lake Mead was both thrilling and made very visual. The image of the fool (Dondi) dancing on the "tower" while the water bubbled and hell was breaking loose was amazing. The last scene of Crane and his father was actually quite moving.

How could the performance have been better?

Every time Pinchot whispered, I wanted to throttle him. I had to hit the rewind and jack the sound up as loud as it would go in order to hear, then of course, immediately turn the sound back down when he was done. His female voices are, literally, weak, as he delivers his feminine voices with reedy, light tones that make them sound slow-witted.

Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?

No; it is too much to absorb. It is such an original book that I prefer to let in sink in more slowly.

Great story; sometimes annoying narration

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