Zafón has a fine talent for inserting unexpected hitches into a story line already resistant to graphing, whose outcome is definitely not seen from afar. The picture is complicated by the arrival of another curious publisher, Andreas Corelli, who offers David piles of pesetas to write, well, a book of a different sort, involving research that yields piles of corpses and occasions ample cliffhangers. This leads him into an onerous contract with the usual crooked publishers and, indirectly, into a rivalry with his former mentor-all of which, naturally, entails love triangles and smoldering egos. The none-too-heroic hero, David Martín, is an aspiring journalist who bucks hackwork to turn in a crowd-pleasing series for a tough boss. Indeed, this is a prequel-but only of a kind: Familiar figures turn up at points, only to seem less than familiar as the narrative twists and turns. Fans of his earlier book will be pleased to find themselves on patches of familiar ground, including a revisit to that wonderful conceit, the Cemetery of Forgotten Books. Mix Edgar Allan Poe with Jorge Luis Borges, intellectual mysterian Arturo Pérez-Reverte, and maybe add a dash of Stephen King, and you have some of the makings of Zafón’s sensibility. Another delicious supernatural mystery from bestselling Catalan author Zafón ( The Shadow of the Wind, 2005).
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