'The Angel's Game' by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Poor consolation for David, who's penniless, ill and helpless as Cristina marries a friendly rival. And just when all hope seems gone, his savior arrives: a French publisher named Andreas Corelli. He wants David to use his pulp skills to create a magnificent fable as passionate and compelling as anything in the Bible -- and in exchange, Corelli promises fantastic wealth and a promise to restore David's health, which is rapidly fading. David can't believe his luck -- or in his own apparent worthiness.

"I think you judge yourself too severely," Corelli responds. "I've been watching you for years. . . . I've read all your work. . . . I dare say I know you better than you know yourself. Which is why I'm sure that in the end you will accept my offer."

"Offer" -- wouldn't "pact" be a better term? With his fashionable white suit, an angel pin gleaming on his lapel, his long fingers and black, predatory eyes, Corelli's diabolical identity is about as hard to miss as Robert De Niro's Louis Cyphre in the 1987 movie "Angel Heart" (remember when he picked up a hard-boiled egg, a symbol of the soul, and sank his teeth into it?). Zafon hardly conceals Corelli's identity. When David asks, for instance, "What did you want to be as a child, Senor Corelli?," the publisher's answer is quite candid: "God."

This won't spoil anything -- the greater mystery of "The Angel's Game" is that David isn't the first client of Corelli's to take on this assignment. In fact, David soon learns that the former owner of the shabby tower house that he rents -- a man named Diego Marlasca (note their common initials) -- had once written a book for the same publisher. By looking into this vanished figure's fate, David realizes what may happen to him if he doesn't fulfill his contract -- or maybe even if he does.

This quest, though, isn't nearly as successful as the book's opening section, which follows David's early writing career. There's just something thrilling about watching a young person in the first flush of his powers, and Zafon captures David's swagger and cockiness wonderfully. The search for what happened to Marlasca, however, becomes at times a little too crowded with plot hurdles -- there's too much that must be cleared before the final showdown can occur.

Zafon also returns to the great set piece of "Shadow of the Wind," the Cemetery of Forgotten Books -- an immense subterranean library of winding corridors containing "the sum of centuries of books that have been lost and forgotten, books condemned to be destroyed and silenced forever." While this vast repository is clearly an echo of Umberto Eco's medieval library in "The Name of the Rose," the cemetery also reminds us of something else: the difficulties facing any writer. What's been forgotten outweighs what we remember.

If the odds of success are this bad, why, then, would anyone want to become a writer? Every scribe has to answer this for him or herself, but at least they can find some solace in a simple fact asserted by "The Angel's Game": Writing doesn't come easy to anybody, not even the Devil.

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nick.owchar@latimes.com