The Butcher''s Boy features an unnamed hitman as primary protagonist. Murder is a craft for the "Butcher’s Boy", a reference to the man''s foster father, "Eddie the Butcher", who raised him in the trade. After the contract killer successfully completes a series of hits in the American west, he arrives in Las Vegas, Nevada to pick up his fee. Once there, however, he learns that he has become a liability to his shadowy Mafia employers, faces an attempt on his own life, and begins to violently improvise as he seeks to escape the criminal organization. The initial hits completed by "The Butcher''s Boy" attract the attention of U.S. government specialists on organized crime. Elizabeth Waring, a bright young analyst in the Justice Department, begins to see a pattern in the killings, and as the violence escalates around the United States, works her way closer to the identity of the murder "specialist". The book features sections from the viewpoint of both major characters and draws the reader into the minds of the killer and investigator. Most critics reported that readers hope the "Butcher''s Boy" will succeed in evading both his Mafia pursuers and the government agents.

The Butcher''s Boy

The drama''s main plot centers on Vandome, a French gentleman and nephew to the King of France. He returns from a three-years'' journey abroad as a merchant, to find that the personal lives of his friends and family are strangely disordered. He had previously kept up a chivalrous, courtly, and platonic affection with Marcellina, the wife of his friend the Count Vaumont. She missed Vandome so intensely, once he''d left on his travels, that her husband was provoked to a jealous outburst; and as a result, the offended countess has retreated into a life of seclusion, sleeping by day and waking by night. Vandome also discovers that his sister has died in his absence &mdash; and that her husband, the Earl of St. Anne, has been so overcome with grief that he has had his late wife''s body embalmed, to keep at home and mourn over. Vandome is left to sort out the emotional problems of his friends and restore a semblance of balance and sanity to their little society. Marcellina''s sister Eurione has joined her sister in her nocturnal lifestyle; she perversely idealizes both the Countess and the Earl. Vandome realizes that this idealization masks Eurione''s romantic attraction to St. Anne &mdash; which gives him a potential solution to the Earl''s predicament. He tells St. Anne that he, Vandome, is in love with Eurione, and solicits the Earl to act as his go-between. Their old friendship leads the Earl to acquiesce to Vandome''s request; and once Vandome had gotten the Earl and Eurione together, he bows out of his fictitious attraction and lets nature take its course. The Earl of St. Anne and Eurione are betrothed at the play''s end. Vandome takes a different approach to the Countess Marcellina''s problem. Early one morning, as Marcellina and Eurione are about to retire for their day''s night, Vandome interrupts them with a false report of the Count Vaumont''s infidelity. Vandome works on their emotions so persuasively that the two women go to find Vaumont and confront him about his alleged unfaithfulness. When they reach the local Duke''s court, only to realize that the story is false, the Duke thanks them for their attendance on his Duchess. Marcellina''s spell of self-imposed nocturnal isolation has been broken. The play, however, draws its title from the central character of its comic subplot. Monsieur D''Olive is a satirical portrait of a Jacobean gallant, foppish, vain, pompous, verbose and fantastical, and liable to be duped through his own excesses of character and ego. He conceives himself a wit, though he is rendered wit''s victim by the tricks of two joking courtiers. Mugeron and Rodrigue trick D''Olive into thinking that he has been appointed to an important foreign embassy...and that he must act the part. In attempting to do so, D''Olive embarrasses himself at the Duke''s court, giving long-winded speeches about tobacco and kissing the Duchess. The two courtiers further play upon D''Olive by sending him a forged love letter from a prominent lady of the Duke''s court; when he comes in disguise to meet his inamorata, he is exposed again.

Monsieur D''Olive

} In the story The Demon Awakens, Elbryan Wyndon and his childhood friend Jilseponie Ault (who is usually called Pony) whose lives are irrevocable changed by the destruction of their home town Dundalis, and Avelyn Desbris who is a vary pious man that enters a group of monks that go to a monastery by the name of St. Mere Abelle to study and serve under god. So while Elbryan and Pony try to sort out their lives Avelyn comes to terms with the all-to human brothers of the church and the myriad injustices he watches them cause. After the destruction of Elbryan’s home town he is taken in by the Touel’alfar and to their home Andur’Blough Inninnes (The Forest of cloud) and teaches him to not just train his body but his mind in the ways of philosophy and to be a formidable ranger. While Elbryan is training his childhood friend Pony can’t even remember her past and is trying to ease the pain of her forgotten past. While all this is happening Avelyn has problems of his own and soon has to leave the church in a most unexpected way. It is not till years later when they all meet each other and fight an evil like no other by the name of Bestesbulzibar who is a mighty demon that was reawakened by the humans weakness to rule all the realm with an army of goblins, powries (dwarfs), and Fomorian Giants and not only that the church is after Alvelyn to. So now this ragtag group of friends and with the help of some unlikely allies must stop the demon and save the entire realm from its impending doom.

The Demon Awakens

Ty Hauck learns of the murder of a close personal friend April Glassman along with her husband Marc and their daughter. The murder was clearly meant to look like one of a recent string of home invasions, but very little about this murder parallels the other home invasions. The murder of Marc Glassman, a trader at a major brokerage, has an immediate and dramatic effect on world financial markets. Coincidentally, Glassman had gone out of his way to violate company policy, having dramatically over leveraged his positions. His murder brings down one of Wall Street''s oldest and most respected brokerages. Hauck has started a new job with Talon, a security firm whose largest client is Reynolds Ried, “a Wall Street icon.” Merrill Simons, the ex-wife of Reynolds Rieds'' CEO, hires Hauck to check up on her suspicions about her new love interest Dani Thibault. As Hauck investigates Thibault he begins to see clues that connect Thibault to the murder of Marc Glassman and the apparent suicide of James Donovan, another over extended trader from a different firm. In Washington, Treasury agent Naomi Blum watches millions of dollars in suspicious bank transfers. Her research leads her to follow the same trail as Hauck. Hauck and Blum team up to unravel evidence that all connects back to Dani Thibault. Their search takes them to Serbia and leads back to London to find Marty al-Bashir, the chief investment officer of the Royal Saudi Partnership. As witnesses are quickly silenced in a string of murders, the trail leads all the way back to the Secretary of the Treasury in Washington and Peter Simons, the CEO of Reynold''s Reid.

Reckless

Lanark comprises four books, arranged in the order Three, One, Two, Four (there is also a Prologue before Book One, and an Epilogue four chapters before the end of the book). In the Epilogue, the author explains this by saying that "I want Lanark to be read in one order but eventually thought of in another", and that the epilogue itself is "too important" to go at the end (p.&nbsp;483). In Book Three, a young man awakes alone in a train carriage. He has no memory of his past and picks his name from a strangely familiar photograph on the wall. He soon arrives in Unthank, a strange Glasgow-like fantasy city in which there is no daylight and whose disappearing residents suffer from strange symbolic diseases. Lanark begins to associate with a group of twenty-somethings to whom he cannot fully relate and whose mores he cannot understand, and soon begins to suffer from Dragonhide, a disease which turns his skin into scales as an external manifestation of his emotional repression. Lanark is eventually swallowed by the earth, and awakes in The Institute, a sort of hospital which cures patients of their diseases but uses the hopeless cases for power and food. Upon learning this, Lanark is horrified and determines to leave. Books One and Two constitute a realist Bildungsroman beginning in pre-War Glasgow, and tell the story of Duncan Thaw ("based on myself, he was tougher and more honest"), a difficult and precocious child born to impecunious and frustrated parents in the East End of Glasgow. The book follows Thaw''s wartime evacuation, difficult secondary education and his scholarship to the Glasgow School of Art, where his inability to form relationships with women and his obsessive artistic vision lead to his descent into madness and eventual suicide by drowning. Book Four sees Lanark begin a bizarre, dreamlike journey back to Unthank, which he finds on the point of total disintegration, wracked by political strife, avarice, paranoia and economic meltdown, all of which he is unable to prevent. During various stages of the journey, during which he meets his author, he rapidly ages. He finally finds himself old, sitting in a hilltop cemetery as Unthank breaks down in an apocalypse of fire and flood, and, his time of death having been revealed to him, he ends the book calmly awaiting it.

Lanark: A Life in Four Books

Set in the early 1970s, this novel serves as the introduction to Spenser, a private investigator in Boston. Spenser is hired by Bradford W. Forbes, the president of the fictional Taft university (heavily implied to be Northeastern) to recover a stolen illuminated manuscript, a medieval document of great historical and literary importance. It is being held ransom by an unknown organization that demands $100,000 be donated to a free school for the manuscript''s return. It has no inherent monetary value and cannot be fenced. Head of campus security Carl Tower recommends investigating a radical student group called ''SCACE'' (Student Committee Against Capitalist Exploitation) and their secretary, Terry Orchard. After talking to her and boyfriend Dennis Powell, Spenser receives a call from Terry in the middle of the night requesting help. Spenser arrives at her apartment to find Dennis murdered, the killer having used Terry''s gun, and Terry under the influence of an unknown drug. He determines that the murder is an attempt to frame Terry and from that point is determined to clear her name, believing the missing manuscript and Dennis''s murder are related. Spenser''s investigation leads him to Lowell Hayden, an English professor at the university who is reputedly an anonymous member of SCACE. Spenser asks permission of the English Department head to interview the members of the faculty but is rebuffed. Ignoring the department head''s warning Spenser sneaks up to Hayden''s office and interviews him anyway. Hayden denies knowing either Dennis Powell or Terry Orchard, although Spenser believes Hayden does in fact know them. Spenser leaves the English Department offices and is met by campus security: he has been summarily ''fired'' from finding the manuscript. Spenser is summoned to meet Joe Broz, a local crime lord, shortly after talking to Hayden. Broz warns Spenser to stop his investigation and hints that the manuscript will be returned if he does. The very next day the manuscript is anonymously returned to the university, just as Broz said it would be. Undeterred by this series of events Spenser continues his investigation to prove Terry''s innocence in the murder of Powell and tie it to the theft of the manuscript. Spenser tries to contact Cathy Connelly, Terry Orchard''s former roommate and the only other person who knew Terry owned a gun. Connelly doesn''t answer her door so Spenser breaks in. He finds Connelly''s body floating in the bathtub, in his estimation murdered. Boston Police Captain Yates believes the death was accidental but his subordinates, Lieutenant Martin Quirk and Sergeant Frank Belson, believe otherwise. Nor do they believe Terry Orchard murdered Dennis Powell. Spenser begins working unofficially with Quirk and Belson to find the truth behind the Powell and Connelly murders. This is the first of many such collaborations that continue throughout the Spenser series. It is a mutually beneficial relationship: the police are able to use Spenser to gather information that they could not obtain through strictly legal channels and Spenser is able to use police resources to which he would not normally have access. After a gun battle with some of Broz''s gun thugs near Jamaica Pond in Boston and a life and death struggle with Broz''s top hit man in a Boston hotel, Spenser ties Joe Broz to Lowell Hayden, leading to Hayden''s arrest and possibly Broz''s arrest. Dennis Powell was in fact dealing heroin on the university campus, heroin supplied by Broz to Hayden, and Hayden to Powell. Hayden believed the heroin would allow people to realize the truth behind SCACE''s anarchist ideals; Powell dealt it for the sake of the money to be made from it. Believing Powell had betrayed SCACE Hayden had Broz put a hit on Powell, orchestrated the framing of Terry Orchard for the crime, and murdered Cathy Connelly himself to cover it up. The manuscript was stolen by Powell at Hayden''s behest to help fund SCACE''s cause. Broz had Hayden return it in the hopes that Spenser would drop the case before discovering the heroin distribution scheme.

The Godwulf Manuscript

"Would you like to see a picture of a murderer?", Jane Marple is asked by Major Palgrave whilst on a luxurious holiday in the Caribbean. When she replies that she would like to hear the story, he explains. There once was a man who had a wife who tried to hang herself, but failed. Then she tried again later, and succeeded in killing herself. The man remarried to a woman who then tried to gas herself to death. She failed, but then tried again later and succeeded. Just as Major Palgrave is about to show the picture to her, he looks over her shoulder, appears startled, and changes the subject. The next morning, a servant, Victoria Johnson, finds him dead in his room. Doctor Graham concludes that the man died of heart failure; he showed all the symptoms, and had a bottle of serenite (a drug for high blood pressure) on his table. Miss Marple is convinced that Palgrave was murdered, but needs to see the photograph he was about to show her before seeing something over her shoulder that caused him to stop. She asks Doctor Graham to find it, saying it is a picture of her nephew. Meanwhile, she interviews other people, including Tim and Molly Kendall, the owners of the hotel, Mr Rafiel, an invalid, and Esther Walters, Mr. Rafiel''s secretary, Lucky Dyson and her husband and Edward and Evelyn Hillingdon. On the beach when Mr Rafiel is going for a swim, Miss Marple sees Senora de Caspearo, a woman on holiday. She says that she remembers Major Palgrave because he had an evil eye. Miss Marple corrects her that he actually has a glass eye, but she still says that it was evil. Victoria informs the Kendalls that she did not remember seeing the serenite on the man''s table when she was tidying up in the afternoon. That night, Victoria is found stabbed. Molly starts having nightmares every night, and Miss Marple investigates why Molly is having nightmares. She finds Jackson in the house looking at Molly''s cosmetics, saying that if belladonna was administered to it, then it would cause nightmares. The next night, Tim finds Molly unconscious on the floor, having taken an overdose of sleeping pills. The police are involved, and a cook, Enrico, tells them that he saw Molly Kendall holding a steak knife before going outside. Miss Marple also asks people if Major Palgrave told people about the photo, and other people say that it was not a photo of a wife killer he said, but a husband killer and Miss Marple becomes confused. At night, Tim wakes up the hotel as his wife, Molly, is missing. They find what seems to be her body, in a creek. Miss Marple arrives and tells them that it is not Molly, but Lucky; the two resemble one another. Miss Marple rudely wakes Mr Rafiel at night and tells him that they must prevent another death. They go to Tim and Molly Kendall''s house and find Tim asking Molly to drink some wine as it will soothe her down. Miss Marple takes it away from him and gives it to Rafiel, saying that there was a deadly narcotic in it. She explains that Tim Kendall is the wife killer that Major Palgrave had a photo of, but saw him over Miss Marple''s shoulder. Miss Marple thought that he saw someone on the right, where the Hillingdons and the Dysons were coming up the beach, but she remembered that he had a glass eye so could not see on his right, but only on his left where Tim and Molly were sitting. Tim was planning to kill his wife, but Major Palgrave recognized him and so had to be killed, and Victoria remembered the serenite so she was killed. Tim put belladonna in Molly''s cosmetics to have a reason for her to commit suicide. When Molly accidentally took the sleeping pill overdose, Tim saw his chance and asked her to meet him by the creek. Molly, on her way to the meeting, had a scary vision from the belladonna and wandered off. Tim saw Lucky waiting there and mistook her for Molly and killed her. He was about to poison her when Miss Marple came in. Esther Walters suddenly falls to Tim''s knees and says that Tim isn''t a killer. Tim shouts at her, asking whether she wants to get him hanged. We learn that Tim was planning to marry Esther, after Molly''s death, because he had heard that she was going to inherit a large sum of money from Mr Rafiel. In the epilogue, we see Miss Marple taking her plane back to England, surrounded by her friends from the hotel.

A Caribbean Mystery

British Secret Service agent James Bond is asked by his superior, M, to join him for the evening at M''s club, Blades, where one of the members, the multi-millionaire businessman Sir Hugo Drax, is winning a lot of money playing bridge, seemingly against the odds. M suspects Drax of cheating, but although claiming indifference, he is concerned why a multi-millionaire and national hero, such as Sir Hugo, would cheat at a card game. Bond confirms Drax''s deception and manages to "cheat the cheater"—aided by a cocktail of powdered Benzedrine mixed with non-vintage champagne and a deck of stacked cards—winning £15,000 and infuriating the out-smarted Drax. Drax is the product of a mysterious background, unknown even to himself (allegedly). As a supposed British soldier in World War II, he was badly injured and stricken with amnesia in the explosion of a bomb planted by a German saboteur at a British field headquarters. After extensive rehabilitation in an army hospital, however, he eventually returned home to become a major aerospace industrialist. After building his fortune and establishing himself in business and society, Drax started building the "Moonraker", Britain''s first nuclear missile project, intended to defend the United Kingdom against its Cold War enemies (c.f. the real Blue Streak missile). The Moonraker rocket was to be an upgraded V-2 rocket using liquid hydrogen and fluorine as propellants; to withstand the ultra-high combustion temperatures of its engine, it used columbite, in which Drax had a monopoly. Because the rocket''s engine could withstand higher heat, the Moonraker was able to use more powerful fuels, greatly expanding its effective range. After a Ministry of Supply security officer working at the project is shot dead, M assigns Bond to replace him and also to investigate what has been going on at the missile-building base, located between Dover and Deal on the south coast of England. All of the rocket scientists working on the project were German. At his post on the complex, Bond meets Gala Brand, a beautiful Special Branch agent working undercover as Personal Assistant to Drax. He also uncovers clues concerning his predecessor''s death, concluding that the former Security Chief may have been killed for witnessing a submarine off the coast. Drax''s henchman Krebs is caught by Bond snooping through his room. Later, an attempted assassination nearly kills Bond and Gala under a landslide, as they swim beneath the Dover cliffs. Drax takes Gala to London where she discovers the truth about the Moonraker (by comparing her own launch trajectory figures with those in a notebook picked from Drax''s pocket), but she is caught. She soon finds herself captive at a secret radio station (intended to serve as a beacon for the missile''s guidance system) in the heart of London. While attempting to rescue her in a car chase, Bond is also captured. Drax tells Bond that he was never a British soldier and has never suffered from amnesia. In fact, he was a German commander of a Skorzeny commando unit and the saboteur (in British uniform) Graf Hugo von der Drache, whose unit had placed the car bomb at the army field headquarters, only to be injured himself in the detonation. The amnesia story was simply a cover he used while recovering in hospital, in order to avoid allied retribution, although it would lead to a whole new British identity. Drax, however, remained a dedicated Nazi, bent on revenge against England for the wartime defeat of his Fatherland and his prior history of social slights suffered as a youth growing up in an English boarding school before the war. He now means to destroy London with the very missile he has constructed for Britain, by means of a Soviet-supplied nuclear warhead that has been secretly fitted to the Moonraker. He also plans to play the stock market the day before to make a huge profit from the imminent disaster. Brand and Bond are imprisoned under the Moonraker''s booster engines so as to leave no trace of them once the Moonraker is launched. Before this first (supposedly un-armed) test firing, Bond and Gala escape. Gala gives Bond the proper coordinates to redirect the gyros and send the Moonraker into the sea. Having been in collaboration with Soviet Intelligence all along, Drax and his henchman attempt to escape by Russian submarine—only to be killed as the vessel flees through the very waters onto which the Moonraker has been re-targeted. After their de-briefing at headquarters, Bond meets up with Gala, expecting her company—but they part ways after Gala reveals that she is engaged to be married to a fellow Special Branch officer.

Moonraker

This book is told from the point of view of a young boy named Melvin. Borgel shows up one day at the house where Melvin and his family live, claiming to be somehow related to the family, although no one (apparently not even Borgel himself) is entirely sure how. Borgel is eccentric, to say the least, but in time he befriends Melvin. Melvin often goes to a local cafe with Borgel where Borgel often talks in a strange language with other patrons. One night Borgel invites Melvin to go for a walk with him and the family dog, Fafner. Borgel ends up using a wire hanger to break into his car, a Dorbzeldge. As they are traveling along the highway Borgel tells Melvin about traveling though time-space and the other. He explains that he is a time tourist, that time is like a map of New Jersey, and that space is like an elliptical bagel with poppy seeds. Melvin thinks Borgel has gone crazy but soon they are traveling on an invisible highway in space. In space Fafner can speak, and he repeatedly criticizes Melvin and everything Melvin does. The trio end up meeting multiple interesting people such as a bloboform, a man who sleeps upside down in trees, and Hapless Toad (the weak son of the genius Evil Toad, who has met the Great Popsicle), among others. They eventually pick up a strange person called Freddie Nfbnm*. Freddie Nfbnm* persuades the group to search for the Great Popsicle, one of the 26 most powerful living beings in the universe. They go to an island in space with a Glugo, an ape they meet in the suburbs of Hell who agrees to help them find the Great Popsicle. Glubgo warns the group that Freddie is a Grivnizoid—a large and viscous species capable of disguising itself, in this case as a normal person. The popsicle is seen frolicking peacefully in the fields and he is surrounded by a feeling of love that rubs off on all others who see the popsicle. In an attempt to gain the power of the popsicle, Freddie eats it (confirming that he is, in fact, a Grivnizoid). Instead of gaining fearsome powers he becomes like the popsicle and begins skipping around the island. The original trio leaves and returns to Earth. They arrive at the same time they left as they had traveled through time.

Borgel

The story begins sometime in the 29th century on the planet Wilson (orbiting Arcturus) with a young man named Giraut and his romantic, swashbuckling friends, who are all members of the Nou Occitan culture and residents in the Quartier de Jovents, a sort of playground for teens and twenty-somethings who have not yet moved on to the more "grown-up" lifestyle of their parents. Technologically safeguarded, these young adults have swordfights in the streets with "neuroducer" épées and frequent the taverns of the Quartier, living in an imaginative recreation of Occitan literature and the trobador tradition. However, Giraut is forced to grow up much more quickly than most of his friends, because one day his friend Aimeric, who was, before coming to Wilson and becoming a jovent, an economist in the Caledon culture of the nearest inhabited planet, Nansen (orbiting Mufrid), is called upon by the government to return to his home planet on a mission to regulate the effects of the springer on Caledonian economy. The springer is a method of instantaneous transportation which is quickly reuniting humanity across known space. Giraut decides to leave when he catches his girlfriend getting into the Interstellar "arts scene" (the art is called "sadoporn") which is an acting out against the exclusive values and code of honor valued by Giraut and his friends. Thus, Aimeric and Giraut advise the rational council of the Caledonians to adjust their economy to that of the rest of the universe so that the springer will have as few adverse effects as possible. When the Caledonians decide that Aimeric and Giraut, as well as the Interstellar government, are trying to usurp their power, they begin to try to seize back control of everything, and an urban conflict ensues. Giraut discovers among the strife who he really is and begins to see how fake his life back home was, and recognize faults in his home culture.

A Million Open Doors

The novel is largely set in and near the town of Dillsborough, in the fictional Rufford County. The two principal subplots center on the courtship behavior of two young women. The heroine, Mary Masters, is the daughter of an attorney, and has been raised as a gentlewoman. Her stepmother is from a lower social order; believing it best for Mary, she pressures her strongly to accept a proposal from Lawrence Twentyman, a prosperous young yeoman farmer with aspirations to gentility. While Mary respects Twentyman for his excellent qualities, she feels that she cannot love him as a wife should a husband. She admires Reginald Morton, whose cousin is the squire of Bragton and thus one of the two major landowners of Rufford County. Reginald admires Mary as well; but for most of the novel, each is ignorant of the other''s feelings: Mary, as a gentlewoman, cannot take the initiative in such a matter; and Reginald, misinformed that Mary loves another, is unwilling to make an offer and have it rejected. The anti-heroine of the novel is Arabella Trefoil. Her father is cousin to the Duke of Mayfair; her mother was a banker''s daughter. Her parents are unofficially separated, and living in straitened circumstances. Arabella and her mother, Lady Augustus Trefoil, have no fixed abode; they wander from place to place, visiting people who cannot refuse them without creating social awkwardness. At Lady Augustus''s direction, Arabella has spent many years struggling to secure a rich husband who will give her and her mother high social standing, an assured income, and a house of their own. She has lately become provisionally engaged to John Morton, the squire of Bragton and a rising figure in the Foreign Office. He would be an adequate but not outstanding husband by her standards; and when the opportunity presents itself, she attempts to entrap the wealthy and titled young Lord Rufford, concealing these attempts from Morton so that she can accept his proposal should they fail. John Morton falls ill and dies. Arabella, who is not altogether wicked, visits him at his deathbed despite the fact that this will assist Lord Rufford in escaping her toils. After Morton''s death, she accepts an offer of marriage from Mounser Green, a Foreign Office clerk who is taking Morton''s place as ambassador-designate to Patagonia. Like Morton, Green is not a brilliant match for her, but an acceptable one. John Morton''s death makes Reginald Morton the squire of Bragton; at this point, when Mary Masters fears that he has moved too far above her in status, he confesses his love to her. A proposal ensues and is eagerly accepted. The American senator of the title is Elias Gotobed, who sits in the U.S. Senate for the fictional state of Mikewa. The guest of John Morton, Senator Gotobed is trying to learn about England and the English. Through his often-tactless remarks in conversation, through his letters to a friend in America, and through a lecture in London titled "The Irrationality of Englishmen", he comments on British justice and government, the Church of England, the custom of primogeniture, and other aspects of English life.

The American Senator

The Dante Club begins with the murder of fictional Chief Justice Judge Healey, who had avoided taking a position to stop or support the escaped slaves of the South. Found by his chambermaid near a white flag atop a short wooden staff, Healey had been hit in the head and then left in his garden to be eaten alive by strategically placed maggots and stung by hornets. Holmes, who examines the body for the police, recognizes the correlation between the murder and the punishments seen in Dante''s Inferno. Then Reverend Talbot, who was paid by the Harvard Corporation to write against Dante, was found dead in an underground cemetery, buried up to his waist upside down, his feet burnt and buried over money that he had accepted as a bribe. Members of the Dante Club, a group of poets translating The Divine Comedy from Italian into English, notice the parallels between the murders and the punishments detailed in Dante''s Inferno. The club, including Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., and James Russell Lowell, sets out to solve the murders, fearing that the truth will ruin Dante''s burgeoning reputation in America, thus making their translation a failure, as well as the obvious problem that they would be virtually the only suspects if they reported this information to the police. Then, Phineas Jennison, both a wealthy contributor to the Harvard Corporation and friend to the translators (a "schismatic"), is sliced open exactly down the middle&mdash;all killed in extreme fashion and undeniable resemblance to the punishments of people in Dante''s Inferno. Eventually, the murderer is discovered to be a former Civil War Soldier Dan Teal, a man who worked at Ticknor and Fields. Driven partly mad by the trauma of his war experiences, Teal hears Dante Club member George Washington Greene giving sermons on Dante to other soldiers, and becomes convinced that Dante alone understood the need for perfect justice in the world. With protecting Dante as his sole motivation, Teal takes it upon himself to release Hell''s punishments as indicated by Dante, in order to purify the city. Teal finds each of his victims when learning of their involvement in the stopping of the translations, which become their respective sins. The club eventually tries to capture him, with the aid of Boston''s first African-American policeman Nicholas Rey, the only other person who saw the connection, while attempting to punish Harvard Treasurer Dr. Manning and Pliny Mead ("the traitors"). Mead was a student of the Dante course who helped betray his teacher by cooperating with Manning. He later fled when the club attempted to punish him for his involvement in stopping the translation of the Inferno. They later encounter him as he tries to round up the translators, to punish them for not embracing his "work." Dr. Manning&mdash;saved by Longfellow, Holmes, Rey, Lowell, and Fields&mdash;realizes the situation as he recovered from his attempted punishment of being buried naked in ice. He sees Teal on the street with a gun to Longfellow, and Manning ends the murderer''s life, thus returning the city to normal.

Over 8000 Takeaways For Your Brain!

Read - Listen - Learn

The Butcher's Boy

No Author Listed

Monsieur D'Olive

By George Chapman

The Demon Awakens

By Robert Anthony Salvatore

Reckless

By Andrew Gross

Lanark: A Life in Four Books

By Alasdair Gray

The Godwulf Manuscript

By Robert B. Parker

A Caribbean Mystery

By Agatha Christie

Moonraker

By Ian Fleming

Borgel

By Daniel Pinkwater

A Million Open Doors

By John Barnes

The American Senator

By Anthony Trollope

The Dante Club

By Matthew Pearl