The Dante Club

While the press and book trade have been getting themselves into a lather about the paperback of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, Matthew Pearl's ingenious thriller The Dante Club has slipped through the net.

The novel is based upon the true story of the nineteenth century Dante Club, an illustrious gathering of the some of the finest American minds of the day. The Club, comprising the poets and Harvard Professors Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell and Oliver Wendell Holmes, and their publisher J.T. Fields, dedicated themselves to the task of producing the first American translation of Dante's Divine Comedy, which was finally published in 1867.

Around this momentous event of literature, Pearl has weaved a fictional, but far from implausible, tale of murder and revenge, in which prominent members of Boston society are being slowly and gruesomely put to their deaths in the manner of the sinners in Dante's Hell. As the translators continue their work, they realise that their work is linked to these deaths, and put all their efforts into solving the mystery.

The novel is steeped in the atmosphere of nineteenth century Boston, from the elegant drawing rooms of the Harvard professors to the grimy backstreets of the city and the wharves. Pearl confidently leads the reader by the nose through a series of false leads and incorrect suppositions on the part of the amateur sleuths, but it is well worth waiting to find out who is committing the murders - and why.