THE DANTE CLUB - Eh.

Having completed The Dante Club, by Matthew Pearl, I can confidently say, "Eh." The novel opens with a grizzly incident that might be murder or might be something else entirely, we're not quite sure. But shortly after this incident, Pearl begins the long, somewhat dry but necessary backstory of 1865 Boston and the characters involved in the novel. This backstory consumes approximately one-third of the novel. It should have been more condensed and better intertwined with the primary plot of the story. The fact that the main characters consist of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, J.T. Fields and James Russell Lowell, and of course, Dante kept me reading, but the workings of the Dante Club are insteresting, not spellbinding.

To my relief, I found myself hooked in the last two-thirds of the novel as the characters begin to engage themselves in the main plot. This book is not for someone looking to read a mystery novel that continues to unwind itself like a puzzle box throughout the book, but it's not bad if you have some time.