A mildly entertaining literary mystery about a serial killer inspired by Dante’s Inferno to “punish” evil-doers in the period after the Civil War. The unlikely detectives are the members of the Dante Club, a group of poets, professors, and publishers, including Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., James Russell Lowell, and J. T. Fields. These gents have been helping Longfellow complete his translation of the Divine Comedy (the first American English translation?) and their textual expertise eventually enables them to predict the next murder. The novel is a bit over done, but reading it definitely felt like a vacation!
