'The Angel's Game' by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Wanted: talented, desperate writer to pen a book for the Devil.

That's the idea driving "The Angel's Game," the follow-up to Carlos Ruiz Zafón's 2004 international bestseller, "The Shadow of the Wind."

If you're waiting for Dan Brown's "The Lost Symbol" (c'mon, you know you are; even those who scorn his writing are curious about Robert Langdon's next adventure), then Zafón offers the best way to bide your time until its release. He offers not only plenty of plot intricacies and mystery but also a lyrical, melancholic style of writing -- something that Brown has yet to create.

"The Angel's Game" is a strange creature, a literary centaur in which a meditation on the craft of writing is combined with a thriller about David Martín, a master of pulp and Grand Guignol.

"I'm an author of penny dreadfuls," he says of himself, "that don't even carry my name." And yet, whether readers know his name or not, David has 1920s Barcelona under his spell, first with a newspaper serial, "The Mysteries of Barcelona," and later with novels under the collective title "The City of the Damned."

That title is very apt for a city that Zafón describes in this manner: "I could see people lying on mattresses and sheets on some of the neighbouring flat roofs, trying to escape the suffocating heat and get some sleep. In the distance, the three large chimneys in the Paralelo area rose like funeral pyres spreading a mantle of white ash." He veils the city in smoke the way Victorian London holds the patent on fog.

David relishes his success, even though it's anonymous, even though it comes at the cost of grinding writing sessions that produce "storms of nausea and burning stabs in my brain." Some of his friends believe he is ruining his talent, and Zafón poses a question early that characters return to in their conversations: What matters more, creating art for a select few, or reaching as many people as possible with a vehicle that's the equivalent of the new "Transformers" movie?

David's beloved from childhood, Cristina, sees it as an either-or situation. "The woman I love," he says of her, "thinks I'm wasting my life. . . . "

Others, like the bookseller Sempere (whose grandson goes on to be the hero of "The Shadow of the Wind") knows this attitude is far too naive. The quality of one's art, he tells the young man, must be measured in other ways. "This book is a piece of your heart, Martín," he says of one of David's books. And, what's more, "it is also a piece of my heart." For the old man, the true value in a work of art is this power to possess a reader, whether the marketplace applauds or boos.