★ 09/29/2014
Fifteen-year-old Oscar is leading a lonely life at his Barcelona boarding school in the late 1970s. While exploring an older part of the city, he meets Marina, a girl near his age who lives austerely with her father, who is a painter, in a rundown house. The teens get caught up in a mystery that began just after WWII. Inventors, aristocrats, opera singers, police inspectors, and millionaires were all involved in dark, sinister crimes, and the aftereffects of these events reverberate through the years and place Marina and Oscar in great danger. Ruiz Zafón tells his gothic tale with a great deal of exposition interspersed with sudden bursts of action. Weyman handles this expertly, narrating with great emotion, making the many minutes of description interesting to the listener when they could easily become tedious. He also plays around with a wide variety of accents: Spanish, Russian, German, and American characters are all subtly but distinctly portrayed, while narration is performed in dulcet English tones. Many characters are elderly and are given creaky voices that wobble in pitch, but it’s never cartoonish. This is a sophisticated performance of an atmospheric, complex mystery. A Little, Brown hardcover. (July)

★ 05/12/2014
In a novel first published in Spain in 1999, Zafón (The Midnight Palace) transports readers to 1979 Barcelona, where 15-year-old Oscar Drai lives a dreary boarding school life. That’s until he meets a girl named Marina, who takes him to an old cemetery where a cloaked woman conducts an odd ritual over a nameless grave. Soon they uncover a twisted tale of hereditary disease, murder, and horrible experiments, all of which took place years ago and whose central figures are dead. Or are they? Zafón is a master of both the subtle simile (“A strange sound throbbed in the darkness. A metallic murmur, like the sound of a venetian blind quivering”) and the outrageous image: “The light filtering down from above revealed the face of a harlequin. Two diamond shapes covered its glassy eyes, and steel fangs protruded from its lips of polished wood.” On a rational level, the tale, like many Gothic thrillers, is preposterous, but readers are never given time to think rationally. Unlikely discoveries in mysterious, half- ruined mansions alternate with spine- tingling action sequences to create a grotesquerie that will delight horror fans. Ages 12–up. (July)

Praise for The Watcher in the Shadows:
"Zafón cuts between his various characters with cinematic skill, and his habit of telling stories within the narrative is put to spine-tingling use...Good, solid scares."—Booklist


Praise for The Prince of Mist:
* "Awesome."—School Library Journal (starred review)


Praise for The Midnight Palace:
"With shades of modern horror classics....Zafón has crafted a highly original plot set within an exotic setting."—Booklist

★ 12/01/2014
Wandering near his boarding school in Barcelona, Oscar discovers a dilapidated mansion in which teenager Marina and her father live in a genteel time warp. Soon Oscar and Marina are roaming crumbling neighborhoods in the old city and stumble into a malevolent mystery that threatens their lives. Spanish novelist Zafón's (The Prisoner of Heaven) cinematic writing ensnares the listener in a supernatural snow globe of altered reality both hypnotic and beguiling. Daniel Weyman's narration is so vivid listeners may expect to see multiple readers listed in the credits. Originally labeled "young adult" when published in Spanish in 1999, Marina has crossed over to an intergenerational, international following. VERDICT If word of mouth fails to push this infective gem, readers' advisory is imperative since the cover illustration does not convey its gothic mysteriousness.—Judith Robinson, LIS, Univ. at Buffalo

2014-05-14
Like Paris in Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera, Ruiz Zafón’s Barcelona is a character in its own right, linchpin for this richly atmospheric, genuinely scary tale.Oscar Drai, 15, leads a solitary existence at his boarding school, marking time until he can escape to wander Barcelona’s cold misty streets and decaying neighborhoods. While exploring the garden of a decaying mansion, he hears a beautiful voice singing and impulsively follows it indoors to its source, an old gramophone, next to which is a pocket watch. When the room’s furious occupant suddenly confronts him, Oscar flees back to school before realizing he still has the watch. Returning it, he meets Germán, its owner, and his beautiful daughter, Marina, who befriends him. Soon, Marina invites Oscar to accompany her to a lonely graveyard, where, hidden, they watch a veiled woman in black place a flower on a gravestone that’s carved with the image of a black butterfly then disappear into one of the abandoned buildings nearby. Curious, they follow her and discover a greenhouse in an overgrown garden and make a horrific discovery. What lies behind the ancient facades—and in the fetid darkness beneath the city streets—is a mystery as layered as the city’s history. It’s well-known which road is paved with good intentions—none are more lethal, Oscar learns, than love and pity.High-quality gothic genre fiction with a classic Mary Shelley sensibility. (Horror. 12 & up)