Angel's Game - the thrilling new novel from bestselling author Carlos Ruiz Zafón

June 17, 10:32 AMNY Books ExaminerKatie Henderson

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In the opening chapter of Angel's Game, the newest effort by Carlos Ruiz Zafón, David Martín is given the opportunity to write an article for the newspaper at which he gophers, getting the first break of his otherwise miserable and impoverished young life. He pours his very lifeblood into the story, a tale of danger and intrigue, and upon finishing approaches his editor for an evaluation as though he is slouching toward his own execution. The first sentence of his piece, "Night falls on the city and the streets carry the scent of gunpowder like the breath of a curse," shows both the indulgent prose of an eager, budding author and the melodrama for which Zafón himself is famous. The streets of Barcelona, after the 500 plus pages we spend exploring every dank corner and shadowy alley, carry more than the scent of the breath of a curse, but rather the rancid stink of evil, the sickly sweet odor of doomed love, and the musky aroma of old money and broken dreams. If this sounds somewhat exaggerated ... it is. But Zafón's forte is not subtlety, it's intrigue.

Angel's Game is Zafón's follow-up to his international mega-best-seller The Shadow of the Wind, and is something of a prequel to it. For Shadow fans, the Cemetery of Forgotten Books will be familiar, as will the eventual appearance of a young Daniel Sempere, though Angel's Game does not assume its readers will be familiar with the previous work. The new novel is the story of David Martín, rescued from a childhood of poverty and orphan-hood by a rich benefactor, Pedro Vidal, and a kindly bookstore owner, Señor Sempere. Through the first third of the story, Martín falls for and loses the great love of his life, alienates himself from his patron, writes his masterpiece and finds it poorly reviewed and forgotten, and is finally diagnosed with a fatal brain tumor. It is at this point, when one senses that the story should be winding down, that the book embarks on the first of its hundreds of unexpected twists. Having left the reader with basically no remaining narrative expectation, Zafón introduces Andreas Corelli, the mysterious and possibly satanic publisher who offers Martín a fortune to write him a new religion, one with the potential to control and manipulate the whole human race. Though Zafón prefers to merely hint at the content of this religious text as Martín composes it, its role in the narrative is central, particularly when Martín discovers that he may not have been the first writer commissioned for the project.

At this point the plot becomes truly labyrinthine; abandoning its central and carefully developed cast of characters to chase the mystery of a story line one suspects will crop up in another of Zafón's novels. (He has said publicly that he has imagined four novels in total encapsulating this world, and I would venture to guess that the events thirty years in the past that Martín investigates here are central to one of the remaining books. They seem clearer in Zafón's mind than they become to the reader.) This leads to a great deal of chasing, stabbing, arresting, and navigating a secretive city perpetually taking on the psychological state of its inhabitants. As the plot spirals somewhat out of control, it remains captivating and irresistible. But the furious plot activity isn't actually resolved, at least to the satisfaction of this reader, which makes the first third of the novel, so full of atmosphere, patience, and possibility, stand out as far superior to the final two.