The Dante Club – Matthew Pearl

The Dante Club – Matthew Pearl

The Dante Club is an exciting, fast-paced thriller that happens to take place in the Boston of 1865 with major literary figures as its leading characters. What an audacious concept — to make Holmes, Lowell, Longfellow, and others the sleuths — and Pearl has pulled it off almost perfectly. The grime, the ugliness, the political corruption, and the post-Civil War ennui of the time are very much a part of this work.

One need not be a Dante aficionado to understand and to appreciate this book. The literary references — and the thirteenth-century Italian poetry — are explained in a way that does not interfere with the flow of the complex plot.

The solution to the mystery is fair, and I had no complaints about it. However, once it becomes clear what the real sequence of events has been, Pearl spends too much time elaborating upon it. This leads to a fairly flat ending. Still, this is a memorable mystery novel.