Book review: "The Dante club" by Matthew Pearl

I picked this book up in Tel Aviv two weeks ago, anticipating to kill some time on the train back home and the flight to Boston on the next day. "The Dante club" is about a few known scholars in their quest to translate Dante Alighieri's "Divine Comedy" from Italian to English in post civil war Boston. As they progress with their translation, a series of mysterious and bizarre murders take place in the city. The police is stumbled and clueless, but then the scholars grasp the obvious connection between the common theme connecting the murders to the book they're translating. Interestingly, this book has a real historic context. The scholar protagonists - Longfellow, Lowell and Holmes are real people who really did have a club for translating Dante in the 19th century. The murders are imaginary, but a lot of the other facets of the novel are real. "The Dante club" is pretty well written and easy to read. I wouldn't class it as "ingenious" (as some praises posted on the first pages claim), but it's pretty good overall.