The Dante Game

✍ Scribed by Langton, Jane

• Book ID: 109117155
• Publisher: Head of Zeus
• Year: 2012
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 722 KB
• Series: Homer Kelly 8
• Category: Fiction
• ISBN: 0670834394

✦ Synopsis

**Drugs, murder, and the Catholic Church confound Homer�s trip to Florence**

When the Pope issues a sweeping edict calling for a yearlong war on drugs, no one is more surprised than the Vatican to find the campaign a success. In every Catholic corner of the world, young people throw down their needles to pick up crosses. In Florence, thousands of them converge on the Duomo to thank Christ for their newfound commitment to sobriety. Nearly everyone is relieved by this development�save for Leonardo Bindo, banker and druglord. To get his business back on track, he seizes upon a simple plan: Kill the Pope.

Standing in his way is Homer Kelly, transcendentalist scholar and occasional detective. In Florence to teach at a new international university, Homer stumbles on Bindo�s scheme while investigating the disappearance of a beautiful young student. His Italian may be lousy, but Homer is the only man who can save Italy from itself.

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.