简介
1865年，波士顿。美国文学史上大名鼎鼎的三位“炉边派”诗人亨利・朗费罗、詹姆斯・洛威尔与奥利弗・霍姆斯，为了一个神圣的文学理想――在美国出版但丁的非凡之作《神曲》――组建了“但丁俱乐部”。
但是诗人的翻译计划被迫中止，因为波士顿和坎布里奇发生了连环谋杀案：
大法官被蝇蛆活生生地吞噬；
教区牧师被倒栽活埋，脚底还有烈火灼烧；
亿万富翁在废弃的城堡中被凶手肢解……
只有但丁俱乐部的成员知道杀人事件的风格和形式直接来自《神曲》的“地狱篇”。面对生命所受的威胁，面对束手无策的警方，诗人抛开书本，背负起阻止杀人者继续行凶的重担。
"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
Boston. 1865. A small group of elite scholars prepares to introduce Dante's vision of hell to America. But so does a murderer.
The literary geniuses of the Dante Club - poets and Harvard professors Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Dr Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Russell Lowell and publisher J. T. Fields - are finishing America's first translation of The Divine Comedy. The powerful old guard of Harvard College wants to keep Dante in obscurity, believing that the infiltration of such foreign superstitions will prove as corrupting as the immigrants invading Boston Harbor. The members of the Dante Club fight to keep their 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 realises that the gruesome killings are modelled on the descriptions of Hell's punishments from Dante's Inferno. With the police baffled, lives endangered and Dante's literary future at stake, the Dante Club must shed its sheltered literary existence and find a way to stop the killer.
作者简介
马修・珀尔（Matthew Pearl），美国新秀作家，1997年以最优异的学业成绩毕业于哈佛大学英美文学系，1998年因其学术成就而被授予美国但丁协会（Dante Society of America）颁发的但丁奖，2000年获得耶鲁大学法学院法理学博士学位，现任美国爱默生学院副教授。凭借处女作《但丁俱乐部》，珀尔一跃成为美国文坛“博学且富于挑战精神的新生代作家”。