The Dante Club
Ratings15
Average rating3
15
Ratings15
Average rating3
A New York Times BestsellerWords can bleed.In 1865 Boston, the literary geniuses of the Dante Club--poets and Harvard professors Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, and James Russell Lowell, along with publisher J. T. Fields--are finishing America's first translation of The Divine Comedy and preparing to unveil Dante's remarkable visions to the New World. The powerful Boston Brahmins at Harvard College are fighting to keep Dante in obscurity, believing that the infiltration of foreign superstitions into American minds will prove as corrupting as the immigrants arriving at Boston Harbor.The members of the Dante Club fight to keep a sacred literary cause alive, but their plans fall apart when a series of murders erupts through Boston and Cambridge. Only this small group of scholars realizes that the gruesome killings are modeled on the descriptions of Hell's punishments from Dante's Inferno. With the lives of the Boston elite and Dante's literary future in America at stake, the Dante Club members must find the killer before the authorities discover their secret.Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes and an outcast police officer named Nicholas Rey, the first black member of the Boston police department, must place their careers on the line to end the terror. Together, they discover that the source of the murders lies closer to home than they ever could have imagined.The Dante Club is a magnificent blend of fact and fiction, a brilliantly realized paean to Dante's continued grip on our imagination, and a captivating thriller that will surprise readers from beginning to end.From the Hardcover edition.
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How I came upon this book was under awful circumstances a few years ago, which might add to my complete and utter disdain for the book. Wait, maybe it was the plotting, characters and premise that caused that, I'm not sure. I was stuck in Chicago O'Hare a few years ago in a layover gone awry situation, forced on standby the next morning.
For some reason I decided that spending money on a hotel was completely out of the question, so I chose to spend the night in the terminal with nothing but my backpack as comfort. I had run out of reading material and this was well before the advent of smart phones, so my conundrum was to go into the airport bookstore and pick just about anything to keep me from going stir crazy or spend the entire night roaming the halls of the terminal and fighting off exhaustion.
Maybe it was the idea that it was “based upon” the Divine Comedy that made me think that somehow this could be interesting, but the reality was downright depressing. What it did accomplish is that it kept me warding off temporary insanity while the overnight staff vacuumed around me before I landed at home and left it for safe keeping in the nearest garbage can.
I liked this one OK. I took me awhile to get into it, but once I did it seemed to progress at a good pace. Like the author's other book (The Poe Shadow) this one also had a plethora of characters that I found hard to keep track of at times. I really enjoyed the mystery and the tie in to Dante's Divine Comedy. I am usually pretty good at figuring out the “who did it” in books long before they are revealed, but this one surprised me and that is always a plus. Overall a pretty good read!
