The Prisoner of Heaven is the third installment in Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s portrait of Barcelona, at the heart of which lies the Cemetery of Forgotten Books.

The story begins in a bookstore, when Daniel Sempere encounters a mysterious stranger who leaves an enigmatic message for Fermin Romero de Torres, Daniel’s oldest and closest friend. That message leads to a series of revelations regarding Fermin’s previously undisclosed past. Those revelations move the story from its point of departure in 1957 to the Barcelona of 1940, when the Fascist regime of Generalissimo Francisco Franco assumed leadership of Spain. What follows involves Fermin, a corrupt prison administrator, and imprisoned novelist David Martin, whose Faustian bargain formed the central thread of Zafon’s novel, The Angel’s Game. The story Fermin tells, which encompasses murder, literary fraud, and a hidden cache of stolen money, reaches from the squalor of a subterranean cell into Daniel’s own life, illuminating previously obscure corners of his family history. Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo plays a role in the narrative.