The Labyrinth of the Spirits

Starred review from September 10, 2018
Zafón follows 2012’s The Prisoner of Heaven with the conclusion to his Cemetery of Forgotten Books quartet, a gripping and moving thriller set in Franco’s Spain that’s fully accessible to newcomers. In 1959, 29-year-old Alicia Gris, a capable, insightful operative working for the Spanish secret police in Madrid who will remind readers of Lisbeth Salander, is tapped by her superior, Leandro Montalvo, for a sensitive inquiry. Spain’s Minister of Culture, Don Mauricio Valls, who’s been the target of anonymous threats and was the subject of a failed assassination attempt, has disappeared. The authorities believe that Valls was pursuing a lead on his persecutor on his own. Leandro promises the emotionally worn-out Alicia that she can leave his employ after this last assignment. When Alicia investigates, she discovers that Valls hid an unusual and valuable children’s book in his Madrid mansion—The Labyrinth of the Spirits VII—and this in turn leads her to a Barcelona prison, where Valls was in charge during WWII. Fans of complex and literate mysteries featuring detectives with integrity working under oppressive and corrupt regimes will be well satisfied.

Narrator Daniel Weyman ably performs the final installment in the Cemetery of Forgotten Books quartet. Primarily set in Barcelona, the story focuses on the last mission of secret police agent Alicia Gris, who must return to her native city where 20 years earlier she was orphaned during the Spanish Civil War. Weyman beautifully balances the plot layers, taking a light tone when describing young love and increasing the tension and tightening his delivery when Alicia and her partner are targeted for assassination after discovering long-buried Franco government corruption. Family secrets, rare books, and unexpected allies round out the satisfying conclusion to the series. Weyman's British accent detracts from the Spanish atmosphere of the story, but his believable pronunciations and solid characterizations fully capture listeners' attention. C.B.L. � AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine

April 15, 2018

Now 29, Alicia was orphaned when the Nacionales bombed Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War and works for Spain's secret police. She's agreed to one last job: find the vanished minister of culture, Mauricio Valls. A rare book leads her to two authors imprisoned in Barcelona's notorious Montjuic Prison, which Valls directed, and to kidnapping and murder during the Franco regime. Readers get one last chance to wander through the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, first introduced in Ruiz Zafón's The Shadow of the Wind. With a 50,000-copy first printing.

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from August 1, 2018

Ruiz Zafón's fourth book in the "Cemetery of Forgotten Books" series (after The Prisoner of Heaven) takes place in Spain from 1938 to the 1970s. Familiar characters from the first three books are living under the repressive, deadly regime of Francisco Franco. Daniel Sempere and wife Bea run a book shop. Fermin survived the fascist bombings of Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War and during one attack saved the life of badly injured nine-year-old Alicia Gris. Carrying mental and physical scars and now working as a kind of "fixer" for the police, Alicia is the focus here as she's sent on an assignment that brings her back to Barcelona and into the lives of Fermin and the Semperes. All is not as it appears and the ingrained character of violence, lies, and silence that defined the actions of the police and the government for almost four decades lead to a surprising ending. VERDICT At approximately 800 pages, this book is a commitment, but it is one well worth making. Complex characters, rich language, and intrigue make it a story to be savored. [See Prepub Alert, 3/28/18.]--Terry Lucas, Shelter Island P.L., NY

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from July 15, 2018
Ruiz Zafón brings his sprawling Cemetery of Forgotten Books tetralogy to a close that throws in everything but the kitchen sink, but that somehow works.It's a very nice touch--spoiler alert--that the female lead of Ruiz Zafón's latest should use a pen to do in a bad guy in a spectacularly gruesome way: "He collapsed instantly," he writes gleefully, "like a puppet whose strings had been severed, his trembling body stretched out over the books." Books are everywhere, of course, inasmuch as this story begins and ends in the hands of the bookseller Daniel Sempere Gispert, who, as ever, is caught up in stories that are in part of his own devising and in part the product of other storytellers--altogether very Cervantesque, that. The story begins in the crucible of the Spanish Civil War, when a very young Alicia Gris, that female lead, comes into the orbit of Fermín Romero de Torres, himself a bookish fellow who connects to Alicia immediately through her love of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland: "Anything to do with falling down a hole and bumping into madmen and mathematical problems is something I consider highly autobiographic," he tells her. Fermín harbors secrets: As readers of earlier volumes will know, he has been imprisoned as a spy in Franco's jails, and a certain jailer who has risen in the ranks of the postwar Nationalist government is due for some payback--retribution that involves, yes, books and writers and literary clues and all manner of puzzles. Ruiz Zafón clearly has had a great deal of fun in pulling this vast story together, and if one wishes for a little of the tightness of kindred spirit Arturo Perez-Reverte, his ability to keep track of a thousand threads while, in the end, celebrating the power of storytelling is admirable. Take that pen, for instance, which "is like a cat--it only follows the person who will feed it." Even, it seems, if that food is vitreous fluid....A satisfying conclusion to a grand epic that, of course, will only leave its fans wanting more.

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August 1, 2018
The final entry in Zaf�n's Cemetery of Forgotten Books quartet is a weighty bookend indeed, a sprawling story that braids together threads from the three previous books: The Shadow of the Wind? (2004), The Angel's Game? (2009), and The Prisoner of Heaven (2012). It's 1959 and Alicia Gris, beautiful, brilliant, and disabled since childhood by a Fascist bomb, is a reluctant investigator for Franco's secret police in Madrid. When tasked with investigating the disappearance of a government minister and partnered with Juan Manuel Vargas, a handsome detective with a sorrowful past, she follows a politically perilous trail that leads her to Barcelona, the turbulent days following the Spanish Civil War, and deep into the mysteries of Zaf�n's countless characters and the books that consume them. Gothic, operatic, and in many ways old-fashioned, this is a story about storytelling and survival, with the horrors of Francoist Spain present on every page. Compelling if unevenly paced, this is for readers who savor each word and scene, soaking in the ambience of Barcelona, Zaf�n's greatest character (after, perhaps, the irrepressible Ferm�n Romero de Torres).(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)