In 1865, the long American Civil War had drawn to an end, and Boston crawled with intellectuals. Some called it a modern Athens, but at least one character in Matthew Pearl's The Dante Club thinks it bears a closer resemblance to hell. And, perhaps not coincidentally, hell has been occupying the thoughts of Boston's leading scholars. As Henry Wadsworth Longfellow works on the first American translation of The Divine Comedy with the assistance of James Russell Lowell, George Washington Greene, and Oliver Wendell Holmes (Senior, though a sulking Junior also appears in the book), they encounter obstacles that have nothing to do with the trickiness of rendering Dante's terza rima verse into Yankee English. Suspicious of all that Catholic gore and brimstone, members of the Harvard establishment throw stones in the translators' path whenever they can, but an even greater threat to the project arrives when someone starts committing murders that echo the punishments of Inferno, forcing the members of Longfellow's Dante Club to become unlikely detectives. Part historical fiction, part whodunit, Pearl's first novel splits the work fairly evenly between both halves. The division of labor doesn't always succeed as well as it should. Pearl's writing conveys a detailed knowledge of mid-19th-century Boston, but, apart from their initial introductions and the occasional assertion of personality, his characters behave interchangeably, trading theories like bewhiskered Charlie's Angels. They come to life when discussing Dante, but Pearl has a tendency to cut short their commentaries to focus on developments in his boilerplate serial-killer plot; red herrings, wrong turns, and dripping corpses all show up with rhythmic predictability. After a start that promises to tether Dante's metaphysical torments with the grit of urban Boston and the lives of American intellectual giants, Pearl settles for simply keeping the pages turning.