Highly Recommended: The Dante Club

My friend Laura Weeks, Russian scholar and linguist as well as musician, recently gave me THE DANTE CLUB by Matthew Pearl to read, since I am reading huge numbers of murder mysteries. This one is extraordinary historical fiction. Taking place in Boston and Cambridge just after the Civil War, it follows Longfellow and his friends (including James Russell Lowell and Oliver Wendell Holmes) as they translate Dante's The Divine Comedy into English for the first time. This part is actually true. In the book, however, there's also a crazed killer on the loose who is reenacting Dante's vision of how different types of sinners are punished in hell. You will learn a lot about Dante, how controversial he was in America, and about Longfellow and friends by reading this book. The murders are gruesome but they certainly bring Dante's work to life. Dante understood the nature of treachery and the subtlety of sin. The author Matthew Pearl writes extremely well and is an expert on Dante and Edgar Allan Poe. Read it!