Boston, 1865. A series of murders, all of them inspired by scenes in Dante's "Inferno." Only an elite group of America's first Dante scholars--Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Russell Lowell, and J. T. Fields--can solve the mystery. With the police baffled, more lives endangered, and Dante's literary future at stake, the Dante Club must shed its sheltered literary existence and find the killer.