The Angel's Game follows in the tradition of the gothic novel with considerable dark shadings, though it also allows for bits of humor to lighten things up now and then. This tale evolves as a complicated love story: the love of books, the love for the art of writing, and the love, though unfulfilled, for a woman. It is also a crime story in which bodies soon accumulate, and it is a tale of disappointment.

Its location in 1920s Barcelona might make it an indirect prequel to The Shadow of the Wind because Zafón has stated that he plans four novels in this particular cycle of books about Barcelona, the city in which he was born. The protagonist of the novel reviewed here frequents the Sempere and Sons bookstore and is introduced to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, two institutions also part of The Shadow of the Wind. As revealed here, the Cemetery of Forgotten Books has a compelling appeal. One almost wishes that such a place actually exists.

The 'hero' of Angel's Game is David Martin. A writer of lurid crime fiction and a hopeful literary novelist, he grew up in the poorer sections of Barcelona, where his virtually unemployable father raised him after his mother left them. An unappreciated veteran of the Philippines War, the semi-literate father eventually found a job as a night watchman at The Voice of Industry, where he ended up being killed on the job by unknown assailants. The newspaper became young David's home away from the street, where the paper's star writer, the rich Don Pedro Vidal, took him under his wings. At first an odd-jobs boy, he revealed some writing talents that Vidal determinedly fostered. And this is where the story in essence begins.

"A writer never forgets the first time he accepted a few coins or a word of praise in exchange for a story. He will never forget the sweet poison of vanity in his blood, and the belief that, if he succeeds in not letting anyone discover his lack of talent, the dream of literature will provide him with a roof over his head, a hot meal at the end of the day, and what he covets most: his name printed on a miserable piece of paper that surely will outlive him." So begins David's narrative as he recalls being called into the office of the paper's deputy editor, Don Basilio Moragas, whose sharp pencil everyone there feared.

He offered young David a chance to produce a story, "not a speech. If I want a sermon, I'll go to Midnight Mass." Within six hours David wrote the required piece that began with this dramatic line, "Night falls on the city and the streets carry the scent of gunpowder like the breath of a curse." Its success led to many similar pieces on the back page of The Voice of Industry. It also made the formerly well liked 17-year-old an outsider at the paper because his colleagues turned against him. Envy is a strong poison.

Eventually, with Don Pedro's help, David is signed to a publisher, though it turns out of rather dubious qualities. But he earns enough through his crime novels, all written under a pseudonym, to be able to afford to rent a large, eccentric house to which he had always been drawn. There he ghost-writes a success novel for Don Pedro (without his benefactor's knowledge), and at the same time writes his own first literary work that, sadly, remains mostly unread thanks to the chicanery of his publisher. Then he receives an offer of an unusually large sum of money from a French publisher to write a book like no other written before.

He accepts the challenge, not realizing that this unusual offer came from an even more unusual individual, and that this will lead him into unforeseen dangers.

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