Rating: 
Summary: A Fascinating Blend of both History and Fiction
Review: The Dante Club takes the reader to the world of 1865 when America's most famous poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow is creating the first American translation of Italy's most famous poet Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedia. While in this translation process, a string of murders are mirroring the very acts that Dante wrote about. This intriguing murder mystery is a tightly woven (fictional) historical narrative that puts the reader in the center of Boston society. A well researched book, it is every bit as gripping as the more recent (and well known) The Da Vinci Code, only much better written and thought out. A great story even for those that have never read Dante's voyage through hell and heaven.
Rating: 
Summary: Over-reaching
Review: Pearl is so in love with Dante, as will be evident if you read his bio, that he has to let everybody know how good Dante is. Unfortunately, he sacrifices the story to tell you just how much he really Really REALLY L*O*V*E*S Dante. Well, great, and so do I, but this could have been a much tighter, better book with the help of a good editor to tone that aspect down.
Also, Pearl gives away a good chunk of the plot fairly early on with a literary conceit that was so obvious I couldn't really believe he was going to make me, or his hyper-intellectual characters, sit through another 180 pages to prove it out. Gee, maybe the cast of this book wasn't so bright after all!
Rating:
Summary: The Dante Club
Review: The Dante Club is a terrific novel and if I hadn't met Matthew Pearl, his father, mother, and brother when Matthew was a young child living in Sunnyside, NY (a town in Queens County of New York City), I would naturally assume that the author was an older individual with much more time on this earth to have gained the muturity to develop such a unique and entertaining novel. The blend in this novel has integrated my enjoyment of biographical historical novels and mysteries to offer a new reading experience for me. When I heard through the grapevine that Matthew had written a novel, I went straight out to buy it. The book is well worth the money spent. The book has been a pleasure to read and I have been recommending it to co-workers who have made note that is has been on the best seller list.
Rating:
Summary: The Dante Club
Review: The Dante Club is possibly the perfect novel. It has a pull-you-in plot peopled with memorable, believable characters - both historical and fictional - and is written in inventive and beautiful prose. As in A.S. Byatt's excellent 'Possession', there are opportunities to read exquisite poetry whilst engaging in a kind of treasure hunt. However, in Pearl's novel it is not treasure we are seeking but the perpetrator of some hideously - yet never gratuitously - macabre crimes. Along the way we are given access to the lives and minds of Dante himself, Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes and other literary figures. Even more deliciously , 'The Dante Club' is very likely to inspire the reader to discover Dante's and Longfellow's works for himself. A good novelist writes good novels, but a great writer is also generous in his writing; he/she broadens the reader's horizons by sharing his own erudition and by gently persuading us to discover the work of other masters. Matthew Pearl manages to achieve all of this in a thoroughly engrossing debut novel.
Rating: 
Summary: Fascinating subjects, but short on thrills.
Review: Matthew Pearl has managed to write an appealing historical novel that centers on the real-life members of the first Dante Club in America. The writing is historically accurate and the information you get about people like Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and James Russell Lowell, as well as 19th-century Boston, is truly fascinating. However, placing these people into a thriller and having them solve a series of murders which appear linked to Dante's Inferno seems a bit contrived. This is a plot device that seems to be used to the point of exhaustion, taking famous literary personalities from the past and turning them into detectives. Frankly, I for one have tired of it.
Rating:
Summary: Poorly constructed and difficult to follow
Review: Historical personages Dr. Oliver Wendall Holmes, James Russell Lowell, publisher J. T. Fields and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow are members of the Dante Club--an intellectual endeavor to provide the first translation of Dante's THE DIVINE COMEDY. However, people are dying in 1865 Boston. They are murdered in the most gruesome fashion. Only the members of the Dante Club realize the murders are fashioned after Hell's punishments in Dante's work. With the future of their work in danger, they must solve these brutal crimes.
THE DANTE CLUB is one of the most pretentious works put out as mainstream thriller fiction in quite some time. Matthew Pearl is a Dante scholar and he wastes not a sentence in making sure the reader is aware of that fact at the expense of plot progression. Characterization is extremely spotty and no character is truly sympathetic. This is actually a somewhat difficult book to read in that it is so poorly constructed and many times the story is difficult to follow. On the positive side, Mr. Pearl manages to portray Boston of 1865 convincingly and the premise of the book is quite original. The packaging (ie. The bookjacket) is also quite attractive.
Rating:
Summary: confusing
Review: I don't understand this book at all. I tried starting over, but by page 50, I still don't get it.
While I know who the subjects are, I'm not familiar with their history, nor do I really know the history of that time period. Perhaps if I did, this book would be easier to understand.
Rating:
Summary: Original Concept, Bad Audio Abridgement
Review: The Dante Club is one of the most original story concepts to come along in awhile. The story take place in post-Civil War Boston/Cambridge and someone is killing well-known residents using Dante's Inferno as inspiration -- very original. Boyd Gaines does a relatively good job narrating the story, giving distinct Bostonian accents to each of the characters; although, one did sound too much like Thurston Howell, III. Even with the original concept and excellent historical characters, this reading suffered from a choppy abridgement. At times it seemed like the story jumped entire chapters. If you love a good, original, historically researched mystery, then The Dante Club is a good choice, even with the bad abridgement.
Rating: 
Summary: Unreadable
Review: Great reviews, interesting idea for a novel, intriquing characters. Looked forward to finally reading it. Ultimately, though, it is simply boring. Obviously a first time writer who needed a better editor. I couldn't get past page 60.
Rating:
Summary: Viciously gripping novel unable to be put down
Review: Pearl creates a portal for you to step through, if you dare. You'll end up in a post-Civil War Boston that reeks of history, erudition, and fantasy, where you will sup with a menagerie of characters (both famous, from Longfellow to Holmes, and refreshingly original, in Patrolman Rey and young Dan Teal) that will lead you through a tightly plotted-out story and discover crimes horrible enough to pay homage to Dante while remaining scarily possible. This is a novel that deserves all the clichés of each new writer that arrives: from "refreshing the mind of a now cynical reader" to "swooping in with a completely original twist" and from "weaving a web of intrigue through strong writing and research" to "a true phenomenon, one that will live on through the ages." There is no book more deserving of a good, willing reader.
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