I don't think I've ever felt so indifferent toward a book. 
 This is unfortunate, as I very much enjoyed Zafon's Shadow of the Wind. The Prince of Mist is something entirely different, and not in a good way. 
 Max and his family move out of the city to avoid the war, and relocate to a house on the beach. Max and his older sister, Alicia, befriend a local named Roland, who Alicia is instantly smitten with. During all this, there's some weird stuff going on around the house, including a ghost story about a drowned little boy and a walled garden containing mysterious statues that seem to be moving. 
 It really had the potential to be interesting. But there was far too much "telling" rather than "showing," and when something exciting happened I didn't find myself caring at all. There is one scene in which Max's younger sister, Irina, falls into a coma due to some oddity that happened with the wardrobe in her bedroom. But the whole thing was cheesy rather than mysterious--they find her lying at the bottom of the stairs, and her father says, "She's in a coma" and they rush off to the hospital. And it really had nothing to do with the plot at all, aside from getting Irina and her parents out of the picture for a few days to tell the rest of the story. 
 Max ventured into the mysterious walled garden once, and then we never go there again. He thinks about it often, but I never did find out what's up with those statues. If it was implied, it was done poorly. I had entirely forgotten about them by the end, to be honest, and they were apparently important to the plot. 
 The villain, Mr. Cain (Cain? Can we get any more obvious?), doesn't appear until the end. He's hinted at throughout the novel, but not enough for us to feel any dread or fear when he's mentioned. By the time he shows up, I wasn't surprised and felt rather indifferent toward him. 
 I just wasn't impressed overall. It felt disjointed and incomplete.