Book Review: Prey for the Shadow by Javier Cercas

Picked up by chance in Barcelona

Sometimes the best books come from detours. This summer I was traveling through Spain with friends, and my flight from Madrid was suddenly cancelled. The next available one was three days later, so instead of waiting, we decided to make the most of it — a spontaneous trip to Barcelona, one of my favorite cities to get lost in.

Somewhere between the cafés and the sea breeze, I walked into a local library determined to pick just one book for the trip. I narrowed it down to Julian Barnes and Javier Cercas — and since Prey for the Shadow is set in Barcelona, I decided to stay local. Cercas it was.

A change in pace

Coming from the sharp, fast-paced world of David Baldacci, reading Cercas was like stepping into another time zone entirely. Prey for the Shadow moves slowly — sometimes too slowly. The rhythm often feels uneven, the plot predictable, and the narrative a bit stiff. There are moments where you feel the potential for something more — a flash of tension or introspection — but it fades before it fully develops.

The main character, Melchor Marín, is compelling: a conflicted detective with a moral core and a haunted past. But even he sometimes feels trapped by the pacing and by threads that never quite connect. It almost reads like an author’s first book — full of ambition and good ideas, but held back by uneven execution and underdeveloped secondary characters.

The moment that stayed with me

Despite all that, Cercas wins a few pages at the end. In one of the final scenes, Melchor gives a speech about fiction — about how reading saved his life, and how we shouldn’t read what others tell us to, but only the books that are meant for us. That passage stood out to me. It was the first time in the entire book that I felt Cercas’s voice breaking through the detective-fiction frame and speaking directly to the reader.

“We should only read what is meant for us,” Melchor says — and somehow, after 300 slow pages, that line felt worth waiting for.

Final thoughts

Listening to Melchor’s advice, I won’t be picking up another Cercas novel anytime soon. But I don’t regret the read either — it reminded me that every book finds you for a reason, even if that reason is simply to point you toward the next one.

Next on my list: Julian Barnes. Let’s see what he has in store.