“The Dante Club” by Matthew Pearl

This tale centers around a mystery set in Boston in 1865, and the heroes are a group of literary people such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Russell Lowell, and James T. Fields. They are a bunch of nerds doing the first translation of Dante Aligheri’s work “The Inferno” into English. Literally, this is a book about a book club.

While they are working on this, mysterious murders that seem to be inspired by the fates portrayed in “The Inferno” start appearing in the streets of Boston. Guess who gets involved.

Of course, since bookworms love to read about other bookworms going on adventures, this is a story bound to make readers happy. The fact that the characters are wonderfully portrayed doesn’t hurt either. Despite the fact that most of them lived over 100 years ago, they seem to pop off the page and are incredibly vivid. It really brings these old and dusty names to life.

The case itself is also very engaging, and comes to a tight conclusion that brings everything together. The plot is very intricate with a ton of side characters that are just as fleshed out as the main ones, which can be confusing but it works out well in this case. Having said that, there are times where there are too many pronouns and you can’t figure out who is doing what, but I have faith in you.

There was one storyline that was kind of dropped though. In the introduction it discusses this strange species of flies that then gets discussed more in the story. But from there it is just dropped and is never concretely resolved so I don’t know what’s going on there.

So this is a great read if you’re a poetry fan, a history fan, a Dante fan, or just a literary fan. And that seems to cover most people these days.