num_pages: 372
description: The Dante Club is a magnificent blend of fact and fiction, a brilliantly realised paean to Dante's continued grip on our imagination, and a captivating thriller that surprises from beginning to end.Boston. 1865. A small group of elite scholars prepares to introduce Dante's vision of hell to America. But so does a murderer. The literary geniuses of the Dante Club - poets and Harvard professors Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Dr Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Russell Lowell and publisher J. T. Fields - are finishing America's first translation of The Divine Comedy. The powerful old guard of Harvard College wants to keep Dante in obscurity, believing that the infiltration of such foreign superstitions will prove as corrupting as the immigrants invading Boston Harbor. The members of the Dante Club fight to keep their 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 realises that the gruesome killings are modelled on the descriptions of Hell's punishments from Dante's Inferno. With the police baffled, lives endangered and Dante's literary future at stake, the Dante Club must shed its sheltered literary existence and find a way to stop the killer.
language: English
title: The Dante Club
titlecomplete: The Dante Club
characters: Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., Nicholas Rey, James Russell Lowell, George Washington Greene, James Thomas Fields, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
genres: Fiction, Historical, Books About Books, Mystery, Thriller, Mystery Thriller, Historical Mystery, Historical Fiction, Crime, Suspense
ratings_count: 40799
places: Massachusetts, Boston, Massachusetts
series: The Dante Club 
awards: awardedAt: 1072944000000
name: CWA Ellis Peters Historical Award
publisher: Vintage