The Dante Club

In 1865 Boston, the poets Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and James Russell Lowell, along with their publisher J. T. Fields, are completing America's first translation of Dante's Divine Comedy. Their work is interrupted when a wave of grotesque murders strikes Boston and Cambridge, each death staged with eerie precision to match a punishment from Dante's Inferno. The scholars realize they may be the only people alive who can read the killer's design, and they begin their own investigation alongside Nicholas Rey, the city's first African-American police officer, who has independently noticed the same connection. As the bodies accumulate, the club must race to unmask a murderer who has weaponized the very text they have spent years bringing to the New World.