A Scattering of Jades by Alexander C. Irvine

The great fire of 1835 has burned most of New York City's wooden downtown. Like many people, Archie Prescott thinks he has lost everything. His home is a smoldering ruin, his dead wife's body at his feet. And next to her is a child's corpse he assumes was his daughter. It seems like the end of everything.

But it is only the beginning.

Goaded into action by New York Herald publisher James Gordon Bennett, Archie runs afoul of one of P.T. Barnum's former sideshow workers, Riley Steen. With the help of an ancient book translated by Aaron Burr, Steen has resurrected a chacmool. This ageless Mesoamerican avatar plans to use the blood of Archie's still-living daughter to bring about the end of humanity.

Meanwhile, Steven Bishop guides tourists through the Mammoth Cave in Kentucky. Steven, a slave, wants nothing more than a world where the color of his skin doesn't deny his humanity. His fateful first meeting with the chacmool leads him to believe that the promise it offers may bring him to such a world.

In the midst of ancient magic and murderous conspiracies, Archie finds himself with the power to save the world or drown it in sacrificial blood...but first he has to stop mourning his daughter and undertake a grim cross-country journey to save her.

A Scattering of Jades (2002)
Tor paperback
406 pages
cover art by John Jude Palencar
my rating : 8/10

Expiration Date by Tim Powers

Young Koot Parganas is growing up in Los Angeles in the 1990s, but his parents won't let him do anything normal. His weirdo parents venerate the spirits of the 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 or abandon his revenge on the woman who murdered his godfather.

Expiration Date (1995 UK, 1996 USA)
Tor hardback
381 pages
cover art by Michael Koelsch
my rating : 8/10