The Dante Club,Used

About the Author Matthew Pearl graduated from Harvard University summa cum laude in English and Americal literature in 1997, and in 2000 from Yale Law School, where he wrote the first draft of The Dante Club. In 1998, he won the prestigious Dante Prize from the Dante Society of America for his scholary work. He grew up in Fort Lauderdale and currently lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he is at work on his next novel. He can be reached via his webside, www.thedanteclub.com Product Description 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. Excerpt. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. The Dante ClubBy Matthew PearlSimon & Schuster AudioCopyright 2003Matthew PearlAll right reserved.ISBN: 9780743517928CANTICLE ONEIJOHN KURTZ, the chief of the Boston police, breathed in some of his heft for a better fit between the two chambermaids. On one side, the Irish woman who had discovered the body was blubbering and wailing prayers unfamiliar (because they were Catholic) and unintelligible (because she was blubbering) that prickled the hair in Kurtz's ear; on the other side was her soundless and despairing niece. The parlor had a wide arrangement of chairs and couches, but the women had squeezed in next to the guest as they waited. He had to concentrate on not spilling any of his tea, the black haircloth divan was rattling so hard with their shock.Kurtz had faced other murders as chief of police. Not enough to make it routine, thoughusually one a year, or two; often, Boston would pass through a twelvemonth period without a homicide worth noticing. Those few who were murdered were of the low sort, so it had not been a necessary part of Kurtz's position to console. He was a man too impatient with emotion to have excelled at it anyway. Deputy Police Chief Edward Savage, who sometimes wrote poetry, might have done better.Thisthis was the only name Chief Kurtz could bear to attach to the horrifying situation that was to change the life of a citywas not only a murder. This was the murder of a Boston Brahmin, a member of the aristocratic, Harvardschooled, Unitarianblessed, drawing room caste of New England. And the victim was more than that: He was the highest official of the Massachusetts courts. This had not only killed a man, as sometimes murders do almost mercifully, but had obliterated him entirely.The woman they were anticipating in the best parlor of Wide Oaks had boarded the first train she could in Providence after receiving the t