Boston, 1865: A secret society meets at Harvard, planning to publish the first American translation of Dante's Divine Comedy. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and James Russell Lowell know the Boston Brahmins at the school have no love for Dante, and would destroy their work if they found out. But when bodies begin to turn up—each victim having been murdered in a gruesome way described in Inferno—the Dante Club must find the killer or face being convicted themselves, in Matthew Pearl's exquisite literary tribute. "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.... 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."—Booklist (starred review)