The Dante Game: A Homer Kelly Mystery

✍ Scribed by Langton, Jane

• Book ID: 107860434
• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Year: 1992
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 729 KB
• Series: Homer Kelly Mystery
• Category: Fiction
• ISBN: 0670834394

✦ Synopsis

The Dante Game takes Homer Kelly to magnificent, mysterious Florence, where he finds himself entangled in a mystery of murdered lovers, the disappearance of a star pupil, and a heroin ring shut down by the Pope's antidrug campaign.

From Publishers Weekly

In another of her civilized, literary mysteries, Langton ( Emily Dickinson Is Dead ) sends professor Homer Kelly, previously at work in New England academic and historical settings, to teach at an American school in a crumbling villa in Florence, Italy. With characteristic wit (and pen-and-ink illustrations), Langton creates a love song to the architectural and cultural richness of Florence as she centers her plot around the pope's visit to a Florentine cathedral. When the villa's adulterous chambermaid and gardener are killed and a ravishingly beautiful student goes missing, Kelly is drawn into a case with ramifications reaching far beyond the concerns of the school's students and staff. One of the latter, a professor of Dante who has a criminal record in Massachusetts, finds that the literary scavenger hunt--"the Dante game"--he has devised for his class is being used to implicate the Americans in crimes occurring all over the city. The game elegantly ties together a mystery that transports readers to a passionate, sun-drenched world where classical statues turn a blind eye on murders perpetrated at their feet. (Mar.)note pub date change
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

The latest Homer Kelly mystery unfolds in Italy, where he joins the faculty of the newly formed American School of Florentine Studies. As students and professors read their way through Dante's Divine Comedy , they and the author draw parallels to modern-day Florence, where a bank official (and secret heroin smuggler) plots to assassinate the anti-drug-crusading Pope, using a Beatrice-like student as hostage. After three murders at the school, Homer and a friend investigate. The novel's strolling pace accelerates only near the very end, but there is adequate amusement for Langton or Dante fans, or both.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.