Hide Me Among the Graves

I'm not sure how it will influence this review, but I'm a little biased where Tim Powers is concerned. Basically, I lurv Tim Powers, and have since On Stranger Tides came out in 1987, which is where I picked up the thread of his work. I haven't read all of it, but Hide Me Among the Graves is my seventh Tim Powers novel, and there was a long period where I had a constant eye out for new work by him. Tim Powers was defining what's these days called Urban Fantasy (or maybe Urban Historical Fantasy, as I'm naming it here) before anyone else knew what it was. His books are hard to categorize: a mix of alternate history and magical systems with a strong dose of romanticism. If I'd had any chance of not being a huge fan of Powers' work, The Stress of Her Regard (for which Hide Me Among the Graves is a loose sequel) crushed it by featuring Byron and Shelley as characters, right at a time when my interest in the Romantic poets was at its peak (it's never gone away, I just haven't found anyone interested in getting together every month or so and talking about "Adonaïs").