The Dante Club

By: Matthew Pearl

Narrated by: Boyd Gaines

Words Can Bleed.
In 1865 Boston, the members 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 are fighting to keep Dante in obscurity, believing that the infiltration of foreign superstitions onto American bookshelves will prove as corrupting as the immigrants living in Boston Harbor.
As they struggle to keep their sacred literary cause alive, the plans of the Dante Club are put in further jeopardy when a serial killer unleashes his terror on the city. Only the scholars realize that the gruesome murders are modeled on the descriptions from Dante's Inferno and its account of Hell's torturous punishments. With the lives of the Boston elite and Dante's literary future in America at stake, the Dante Club must find the killer before the authorities discover their secret.
Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes and outcast police officer Nicolas Rey, the first black member of the Boston police department, place their careers on the line in their efforts to end the killing spree. Together, they discover that the source of the murders lies closer than they ever could have imagined.
The Dante Club is a magnificent blend of fact and fiction, a brilliantly realized paean to Dante, his mythic genius, and his continued grip on the imagination.©2003 Matthew Pearl, All Rights Reserved; (P)2003 Simon & Schuster Inc., All Rights Reserved.

Join the club

If you can't get enough mysteries to fill your listening time, this one is worth a try. It's a quaint, historical, literary mystery that starts slowly, but has lots of twists and turns. Not the best I've come across, but not the worst. An interesting look a Boston in the 1800's.

It was okay

I liked the story but I had a little trouble believing that the characters in the story really would have done these things in real life. I guess I have trouble with real life people being woven into a fictional story, not very believable most of the time.
I thought the beginning of the story was a bit slow but it did pick up the pace after a bit. I was a little dissapointed with the ending, I guess I was hoping for someone else to have actually been the villian.
Overall, not a bad story. I'd say just not a very riviting or memorable one.

Poorly edited

This was disappointing. I didn't realize that this was an abridged version of the book. However,after going back several times thinking that my mind must have wandered, I came to realize that it wasn't my fault after all. Rather,it was the writing, or specifically the editing. Too bad, because the narrator does an exemplary job of vocal inflection, accents and nuances. Furthermore, there is much to glean from the subject matter, but it's too bad an unabridged version is not available (or at least I couldn't find one).

Terribly abridged

I was excited to read this book and to listen to the wonderful Boyd Gaines read it, but the cutting was so jarring that I ended up just reading the book itself. The editor seemed to cut out descriptions of the possible suspects motivations and the “sins” committed by the victims - what make a mystery story tick. They even left out the chapter that gave the reader the ultimate insight into the, by then revealed, murderer’s brain.

Dark yet enjoyable

This was a well read mystery that held my attention so that at times I didn't want to shut it off. The narration is excellent and the characters so believable that at times I laughed out loud at the their antics while trying to solve the mystery. It's not overly complicated and a relatively short book but certainly worth a listen.