From Publishers Weekly
In 1865 Boston, not many people spoke Italian. It was much more popular for people to study Latin and Greek; the classic works in these languages were common reading for students and academics. But the small circle of literati in Pearl's inventive novel is bent on translating and publishing Dante's Divine Comedy so that all Americans may learn of the writer's genius. As this group of scholars, poets, publishers and professors readies the manuscript, much more exciting doings are happening outside their circle. The Boston police are hot on the trail of a series of murders taking place around town. In one, a priest is buried alive, his feet set on fire; in another, a man's body is eaten by maggots. It doesn't take a rocket scientist-only a Dante expert-to realize these murders are based on Dante's Inferno and its account of Hell's punishments. Scholars become snoopers, and the Dante Club is soon on the scene, investigating the crimes and trying to find the killer. A tad unlikely, but it makes for a terrific story. Gaines gives an stirring performance, nimbly portraying some of the "Hah-vad" professors' "Bah-ston" accents and impressively reading the Italian passages from Dante's work. Although it's sometimes hard to differentiate between the various characters-after awhile each stuffy Bostonian begins to sound alike-Gaines nonetheless amuses and, via Pearl's historical references, educates.Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Pearl's fiction debut should please fans of well-crafted literary mysteries. The title refers to an actual group of 19th-century Bostonians who gathered to translate Dante's Inferno for an American audience. Among the members of this exclusive "club" were poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, physician Oliver Wendell Holmes, and poet James Russell Lowell. While poring over the poem, the men find themselves on the trail of a serial killer who tortures his victims in ways that seem to be taken straight out of the pages of Inferno. The police are at a loss and must rely on the club members' unique knowledge of Dante's work to help catch the killer. Pearl, a recognized Dante scholar, uses his expertise to create an absorbing and dramatic period piece. Using historical figures in a mystery setting is not a new idea (e.g., Sir Isaac Newton plays detective in Philip Kerr's Dark Matter), but Pearl has proven himself a master. Best for medium to large public and academic libraries.--Laurel Bliss, Yale Arts Lib. Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From AudioFile
Here's a recording guaranteed to distract the most focused driver. Boston, right after the Civil War, is the setting for this complex and terrifying mystery. Only geniuses could possibly solve this series of horrific murders, and here they are: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and the other eminent members of the Dante Club. Longfellow has gathered this elite group together to help edit his translation of The Divine Comedy. Simultaneously, however, someone is killing Boston Brahmins in the manner in which they might be punished in Dante's Hell. Brilliantly written historic and personal details, which do not intrude but enrich, are persuasively read by John Seidman. The elegance of Pearl's sentences is echoed by the timbre and cadence of Seidman's voice. Seidman introduces us to these literary giants, and as he continues, we become intimate with them, with their families, and with their moral makeup. It is a consuming journey into nineteenth-century New England. This novel should be at the top of everyone's list. B.H.B. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2003, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine


From Booklist
(Starred Review) Pearl's gripping debut novel, set in Boston in 1865, begins with the discovery of the maggot-ridden, dead body of Judge Artemus Healey. The murder shocks the city, and the police are horrified by the possibility that Healey may have been alive for the four days during which the maggots consumed his body. The next murder is equally as disturbing: Reverend Elisha Talbot is found in the underground passages beneath the church, having been buried alive with his feet burned off. The members of the Dante Club--publisher J. T. Fields, essayist Oliver Wendell Holmes, and poets James Russell Lowell and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow--have been laboring on translating and discussing Dante's Divine Comedy and quickly recognize the gruesome murders from the pages of Dante's Inferno. Knowing that only a limited number of people are familiar with Dante's work, the members of the Dante Club conduct their own investigation into the killings. They zero in on a disgruntled Italian academic living in Boston, but the killer, whom they refer to as Lucifer, may be even closer than they suspect. Expertly weaving period detail, historical fact (the Dante Club did indeed exist), complex character studies, and nail-biting suspense, Pearl has written a unique and utterly absorbing tale. Kristine Huntley
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Dan Brown
"Matthew Pearl is the new shining star of literary fiction -- a heady, inventive, and immensely gifted author."


Review
"Matthew Pearl is the new shining star of literary fiction -- a heady, inventive, and immensely gifted author. With intricate plots, classical themes, and erudite characters…what’s not to love?"
-Dan Brown

"Working on a vast canvas, Mr. Pearl keeps this mystery sparkling with erudition... with this captivating brain teaser as his debut novel, seems also to have put his life's work on the line in melding scholarship with mystery. He does justice to both." -Janet Maslin, The New York Times
"Audacious and captivating."
-Adrienne Miller, Esquire

"Mr. Pearl's triumph is mixing these two cultures: wealthy, cultivated men of letters faced with the mysterious and seedy streets of a 19th-century Boston... creating not just a page-turner but a beguiling look at the U.S. in an era when elites shaped the course of learning and publishing. With this story of the Dante Club's own descent into hell, Mr. Pearl's book will delight the Dante novice and expert alike." -Kimberley Strassel, The Wall Street Journal
"Pearl, a graduate of Harvard and Yale Law School and a Dante scholar, ably meshes the literary analysis with a suspenseful plot and in the process humanizes the historical figures... A divine mystery."
-Julie K. L. Dam, People Magazine (Page Turner of the Week)

"Just about anyone who admires smart historical fiction will get a literary jolt out of Matthew Pearl’s gory first novel... His Civil War memory fragments alone add up to one of the most unforgettable accounts of that chapter of American history yet written." -Celia McGee, The New York Daily News
"How the club and the police compete and then converge is the mystery and the thrill in a preternaturally accomplished book as wise as it is entertaining. 'The Dante Club' is a carefully plotted, imaginatively shaped, and stylistically credible whodunit of unusual class and intellect... The writing is passionate, the narrative driven."
-Carlo Wolff, The Boston Globe

"Pearl has achieved that intoxicating blend of reality and imagination that Doctorow gave us 25 years ago with Ragtime. Here's hoping Pearl decides to spend his career writing novels and letting that Yale law degree go to waste. The world has enough lawyers. Great novelists are in short supply."
-William Mckeen, The Orlando Sentinel

"Pearl masterfully synthesizes countless aspects of mid-19th-century life into a riveting mystery that creeps through all corners of crippled postwar Boston. To steal a revelation from the book: Lucifer did not create hell; it was Dante. In The Dante Club, Pearl adds one more diabolical ring."
-Christopher Bollen, Time Out (New York)

"This novel is as erudite as it is bloody. It swings from an account of exotic maggots eating a man alive to a discussion of the finer points of Dante's artistic and political vision. The Dante Club is a unique, ambitious, entertaining read, a historical thriller with a poetic streak."
-Chris Kidler, The Baltimore Sun

"'The Dante Club' is a richly detailed microcosm set generously before us. Within it, wit, erudition and a healthy respect for good old fashioned hugger-mugger conspire to produce one of this year's most agreeable entertainments."
-Bruce Allen, Raleigh News & Observer

"Pearl does what a good historical novelist has to do: Look at the past by the light of the imagination, creating a fictional situation -- there was of course no actual Dante killer in 1865 Boston -- to animate the ideas, issues and personalities of the time... There aren't many writers around who can remind you of both James Patterson and Umberto Eco."
-Charles Matthews, San Jose Mercury News

"Young author finds a 'Pearl' in mystery. Boston winters are cruel, and Matthew Pearl captures every icy finger of wind, every sinister shadow and more than a few human-induced chills in 'The Dante Club'... Pearl is a young author worth following. He's created a work that should appeal to history buffs, literary buffs and crime fiction fans alike."
-Robin Vidimos, The Denver Post

"A hell of a first novel... The Dante Club delivers in spades."
-David Lazarus, The San Francisco Chronicle

“The Dante Club is a thoroughly accomplished first novel. Matthew Pearl does a marvelous job of evoking the period and making it come alive with finely drawn characters and an ingenious story.”
-David Liss, Edgar Award–winning author of A Conspiracy of Paper

“A fascinating, erudite, and highly entertaining account of a remarkable moment in American literary history.”
-Iain Pears, author of An Instance of the Fingerpost

“In The Dante Club, Matthew Pearl expertly combines rollicking entertainment with serious insights about Civil War–era America. The book is fun, smart, and enviably audacious.”
-Darin Strauss, author of Chang & Eng and The Real McCoy

“This first-rate thriller breathes such life into the genre that the term ‘thrilling’ genuinely applies. Matthew Pearl not only succeeds with a deft and elegant plot, but delivers an eloquent and quirky message for our times about the value of literary heroes. In The Dante Club we are privileged to meet the most unlikely quartet of sleuths.”
-Gregory Maguire, author of Wicked and Lost

“The Dante Club is pure pleasure for the reader, magnificently informed without being stuffy, gripping without being merely sensational. I particularly enjoyed the nice, easy swing of its pacing. This book can be savored.”
-Peter Straub, co-author of Black House

“An ambitious and entertaining thriller that may remind readers of Caleb Carr.”
-Publishers Weekly

"Expertly weaving period detail, historical fact, complex character studies, and nail-biting suspense, Pearl has written a unique and utterly absorbing tale."
-Booklist Magazine (starred)

"Matthew Pearl's dazzler of a debut novel, The Dante Club, is just what an historical thriller should be--a creative combo of edge-of-your-seat suspense, fully imagined characters, fictional and real, and an evocative, well-researched, well-realized setting"
-Bookpage Magazine

"A devil of a time... Ingenious use of details and motifs from the Divine Comedy, and a lively picture of the literary culture of post-bellum New England, distinguish this juicy debut historical mystery."
-Kirkus Reviews (starred)

"Absorbing and dramatic... Pearl has proven himself a master."
-Library Journal

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"In 1865 Boston, the literary geniuses of the Dante Club - poets and Harvard professors Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, and James Russell Lowell, along with publisher J. T. Fields - are finishing America's first translation of The Divine Comedy and preparing to unveil Dante's remarkable visions to the New World. The powerful Boston Brahmins at Harvard College are fighting to keep Dante in obscurity, believing that the infiltration of foreign superstitions into American minds will prove as corrupting as the immigrants arriving at Boston Harbor." "The members of the Dante Club fight to keep a 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 realizes that the gruesome killings are modeled on the descriptions of Hell's punishments from Dante's Inferno. With the lives of the Boston elite and Dante's literary future in America at stake, the Dante Club members must find the killer before the authorities discover their secret." Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes and an outcast police officer named Nicholas Rey, the first black member of the Boston police department, must place their careers on the line to end the terror. Together, they discover that the source of the murders lies closer to home than they ever could have imagined.

FROM THE CRITICS

Esquire Magazine

Chosen as "The Big Important Book of the Month" Audacious and captivating... Who can solve these devilish crimes? Why, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and James Russell Lowell, famous writers and Dante obsessives who are called in as CSIs. Pearl's Dante scholarship is truly admirable, and hats off to anyone who's this passionate about the crazy Florentine -- or, indeed, to anyone who's this passionate about anything... As Holmes says to Lowell, 'I fear I will catch your Dante mania.' Don't be surprised if, after having read THE DANTE CLUB, you find yourself revisiting your old tattered college-issued Inferno. How much, it turns out, you've been missing.

The Los Angeles Times

Pearl, while still in his 20s, has written an erudite and entertaining account of Dante's violent entrance into the American canon. His novel describes how the distinguished founders of a Dante Club at Cambridge in 1865 become embroiled in a gruesome set of murders inspired by the punishments of "The Inferno." Pearl's heroes are charmingly eccentric. James Russell Lowell smokes cigars while bathing and reaches for his rifle at slight provocation. The compulsive but kindhearted narcissist Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. writes as much for profit as for inspiration. The club leader, stoic Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, does not sleep at night. In addition to the Pickwick-like central cast, cultural celebrities Louis Agassiz, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. figure in the highbrow misadventures. — Joseph Luzzi

Booklist

(Starred Review) Pearl's gripping debut novel, set in Boston in 1865, begins with the discovery of the maggot-ridden, dead body of Judge Artemus Healey. The murder shocks the city, and the police are horrified by the possibility that Healey may have been alive for the four days during which the maggots consumed his body. The next murder is equally as disturbing: Reverend Elisha Talbot is found in the underground passages beneath the church, having been buried alive with his feet burned off. The members of the Dante Club--publisher J. T. Fields, essayist Oliver Wendell Holmes, and poets James Russell Lowell and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow--have been laboring on translating and discussing Dante's Divine Comedy and quickly recognize the gruesome murders from the pages of Dante's Inferno. Knowing that only a limited number of people are familiar with Dante's work, the members of the Dante Club conduct their own investigation into the killings. They zero in on a disgruntled Italian academic living in Boston, but the killer, whom they refer to as Lucifer, may be even closer than they suspect. Expertly weaving period detail, historical fact (the Dante Club did indeed exist), complex character studies, and nail-biting suspense, Pearl has written a unique and utterly absorbing tale. Kristine Huntley Copyright ￯﾿ﾽ American Library Association. All rights reserved

Janet Maslin - The New York Times

In the ingenious new literary mystery "The Dante Club," someone with intimate knowledge of "The Divine Comedy" appears to be staging murders that mirror the punishments of Dante's "Inferno." Considering that the prodigiously clever first-time author, Matthew Pearl, is a Harvard- and Yale-educated Dante scholar who won a 1998 prize from the Dante Society of America, it is fortunate that he was content with simply writing a book... Working on a vast canvas, Mr. Pearl keeps this mystery sparkling with erudition. Among its many sidelights are the attack by Dr. Louis Agassiz of Harvard upon Darwin's theory of evolution; a discussion of the Fugitive Slave Act and its consequences; the resistance faced by Italian immigrants, who number only about 300 in the Boston area in 1865; and the killing of Dr. George Parkman by John W. Webster, a crime that still haunts Holmes. Most vivid is the battle between the Harvard Corporation and the principals' artistic freedom. "I do not understand how you can put your good name, everything you've worked for your whole life, on the line for something like this,"says Manning, who has threatened to shut down Lowell's Dante class. And Lowell replies: "Don't you wish to heaven you could?" Mr. Pearl, with this captivating brain teaser as his debut novel, seems also to have put his life's work on the line in melding scholarship with mystery. He does justice to both.

Bookpage Magazine

Matthew Pearl's dazzler of a debut novel, The Dante Club, is just what an historical thriller should be--a creative combo of edge-of-your-seat suspense, fully imagined characters, fictional and real, and an evocative, well-researched, well-realized setting that immerses the listener in another time and sensibility. Here, the setting is the post-Civil War Boston of 1865. The characters include some of the great literary Brahmins of the time, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and James Russell Lowell among them, who are hard at work on the first American translation of Dante. The suspense comes quickly when their scholarly efforts are interrupted by string of grizzly murders that exactly duplicate the dire torments described in Dante's "Inferno." Intrigued and horrified, these elite intellectuals put their pens aside to go after the killer themselves. Add Boyd Gaines perfect pitched narration to this mix and you've got a soundly satisfying audiopresentation. Smart, exciting entertainment. Read all 12 "From The Critics" >

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

Iain Pears

A fascinating, erudite, and highly entertaining account of a remarkable moment in American literary history.  — author of An Instance of the Fingerpost

Peter Straub

The Dante Club is pure pleasure for the reader, magnificently informed without being stuffy, gripping without being merely sensational. I particularly enjoyed the nice, easy swing of its pacing. This book can be savored.  — co-author of Black House

Gregory Maguire

This first-rate thriller breathes such life into the genre that the term 'thrilling' genuinely applies. Matthew Pearl not only succeeds with a deft and elegant plot, but delivers an eloquent and quirky message for our times about the value of literary heroes. In The Dante Club we are privileged to meet the most unlikely quartet of sleuths.  — author of Wicked and Lost

David Liss

The Dante Club is a thoroughly accomplished first novel. Matthew Pearl does a marvelous job of evoking the period and making it come alive with finely drawn characters and an ingenious story.  — Edgar Award-winning author of A Conspiracy of Paper

Darin Strauss