The Dante Club

“He was outwardly calm but inwardly bleeding to death.”

Historical fiction mixed with fact. The kind of thing I really like. This one is a bit like the film SEVEN, but here the madman is using Dante's Inferno instead of the seven deadly sins as a template to carry out a series of quite horrific murders. Enter the Dante Club. Holmes, Lowell, Fields and Longfellow (real historical figures). It's up to them to solve this insane mystery before more people are slain.

Overall, this was just ok. I think I enjoyed this learning experience more than the story itself. The highlight for me was the dialogue between the main characters which was excellent, puts you right in the room with the books, cigars, the fantastical beards and various other forms of facial hair. I gave this a 4, it's quite a generous score tbf but I did feel like a learnt something. Those first 50 pages though..... like someone dangling live eels in your face, not very nice.

How I came upon this book was under awful circumstances a few years ago, which might add to my complete and utter disdain for the book. Wait, maybe it was the plotting, characters and premise that caused that, I'm not sure. I was stuck in Chicago O'Hare a few years ago in a layover gone awry situation, forced on standby the next morning.

For some reason I decided that spending money on a hotel was completely out of the question, so I chose to spend the night in the terminal with nothing but my backpack as comfort. I had run out of reading material and this was well before the advent of smart phones, so my conundrum was to go into the airport bookstore and pick just about anything to keep me from going stir crazy or spend the entire night roaming the halls of the terminal and fighting off exhaustion.

Maybe it was the idea that it was “based upon” the Divine Comedy that made me think that somehow this could be interesting, but the reality was downright depressing. What it did accomplish is that it kept me warding off temporary insanity while the overnight staff vacuumed around me before I landed at home and left it for safe keeping in the nearest garbage can.

Maybe it is unfair to try and read a book in the middle of NaNo (National Novel Writing Month) but I did start this book before. I just could not get into it and finally when the second notice came from the library to please return this book I took it back without finishing it. I may give it another try in a few months or maybe not.

I liked this one OK. I took me awhile to get into it, but once I did it seemed to progress at a good pace. Like the author's other book (The Poe Shadow) this one also had a plethora of characters that I found hard to keep track of at times. I really enjoyed the mystery and the tie in to Dante's Divine Comedy. I am usually pretty good at figuring out the “who did it” in books long before they are revealed, but this one surprised me and that is always a plus. Overall a pretty good read!