Why I like Tim Powers’s work
Tim Powers is one of my favorite authors. I've read most of his novels and many of the short stories he's written. He often researches well-known historical figures like Bugsy Siegel (Last Call), Albert Einstein (Three Days to Never), or double-agent Kim Philby (Declare) and finds things about their lives that don't always have complete explanations or are just odd. These people are not his main characters but those odd facts about them are usually a part of the back story that drives the plot. Some people refer to these types of stories as Secret Histories.
Expectations
Based on the book description for Alternate Routes, I didn't think I was getting something like a Secret History. I did expect a more interesting tale, though. If you’re new to Tim Powers’s work, you probably shouldn’t start with this book. (See recommendations at the end of this post.)
What it’s about (no spoilers)
Alternate Routes revolves around Sebastian Vickery, a former Secret Service agent living in Los Angeles and trying to stay under law enforcement's radar. He apparently killed a couple federal agents a few years earlier, and Vickery isn't his real name. He works for a company that uses physical totems and other processes to help them identify when ghosts are near. This information enables them to be a taxi service for customers that want to avoid attention from ghosts (the reason behind this need was never really clear to me). And there are many ghosts near the freeway because a lot of people die on or near freeways so there is a lot of driving through L.A. in this book (more on that later).
The second main character is Ingrid Castine from the Transportation Utility Agency (TUA). (Pretty sure this isn't a real agency.) She works for a team that uses radios to speak to ghosts and find people (or maybe solve crimes, I'm not sure). She manages to find Vickery and warns him not to go to his apartment since her TUA colleagues are there looking for him. After that, these two end up going through the rest of the book helping each other deal with ghosts and a place called The Labyrinth.
The main adversary is a man named Terracotta who is Castine's boss. He is out to get Vickery because of something Vickery overheard while he was in the Secret Service. I thought Terracotta was the most interesting character of the three.
What I Liked
The book has some of Tim Powers's usual interesting ideas. One example was the TUA’s ability to talk to ghosts by having three separate people ask questions - each person says a word then the next person says the next word and so on until the question is completed. Of course, ghosts aren't all there mentally and talk in phrases that make no sense so the information they provide is often like a riddle.
What I Didn’t Like
Despite the book starting off promising and my admiration of Powers's work, I just couldn't wait for this book to be over after the first 80 or 90 pages. I think the only reason it wasn't a "Did Not Finish," aka DNF, is because it was Tim Powers (that and I already have the next two books in the series - the completist in me is waving right now).
The characters aren't developed very deeply and their motivation seems to be "let's just avoid the people looking for us and hope we survive." The dialogue in the book comes across pretty stilted at times and none of the characters were really all that likeable. Even though the explanation of The Labyrinth is interesting and is one of those Secret History things I like, the sections where they are dealing with The Labyrinth became tedious after a few pages.
I think the worst part of it was the constant use of driving directions in the prose. The characters are constantly driving through L.A. to the various scene locations and too much detail is given about how they get from point A to point B. It just felt like padding to make a certain page count. There is one passage in the book that could have been a script for one of the Saturday Night Live skits called The Californians.
Since I already have them, I will eventually read the other two books in the series (Forced Perspectives, Stolen Skies) but I'll be reading something else first just in case they are as sloggy as this was. Hopefully they won't be.
Better Places to Start
If you want a good place to start with Tim Powers's work, I recommend The Anubis Gates or Last Call. A couple others that are personal favorites of mine are Declare and The Stress of Her Regard.