The history was interesting; but the murders were really gross and unpleasant; I'm not satisfied with whodunit. A lot of famous people make guest appearances. I should read Dante's Divine Comedy.
I bought the book at Longfellow House-Washington's Headquarters National Historic Site, run by the National Park Service, that offers interesting free tours and I felt I should recompense them. ( )

It took me forever to get into it, but then I couldn't put it down. I love historical fiction, this didn't dissapoint. ( )

El club Dante
Matthew Pearl
Publicado: 2003 | 410 páginas
Novela Intriga

Boston, 1865. Importantes personalidades están siendo brutalmente asesinadas por un criminal inspirado en los tormentos del Infierno de Dante. Sólo los miembros del club Dante —poetas y profesores de Harvard dirigidos por Henry Wadsworth Longfellow— pueden anticiparse al asesino e identificarle. Mientras preparan la primera traducción americana de La divina comedia enfrentándose a la oposición de la puritana vieja guardia de Harvard, los intelectuales deberán convertirse en detectives y pasar a la acción. Nicholas Ray, el primer policía negro del departamento de Boston, dirigirá la investigación oficial mientras los miembros del club llevan a cabo sus insólitas pesquisas. Un dantesco infierno medieval se cierne sobre las calles de la ciudad, en una época que toca a su fin, convulsa por la recién terminada guerra civil, el asesinato del presidente Lincoln y los disturbios raciales.

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. ( )

I simply could not finish this book. So unnecessarily complicated and pedantic. ( )