Books like Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club, including This is Not a Game and Death at the White Hart.

Reading lists

What to read next if you love The Thursday Murder Club

Historical Mystery

The Dante Club

The Dante Club is a historical murder mystery by Matthew Pearl about a group of scholars in 1865 Boston investigating killings modelled on the punishments in Dante’s Inferno, ideal for readers who enjoy literary puzzles, scholarly investigations and richly detailed historical mysteries. 
 
Synopsis 
Boston, 1865. 
 
A small group of elite scholars prepare to introduce Dante’s vision of hell to America. 
 
Meanwhile a ruthless killer plots in secret to do the same. 
 
When a series of murders erupts through Boston and Cambridge, only this small group are able to decipher the clues – they soon realise the gruesome killings are symbols modeled on the descriptions of Hell's punishments from Dante's Inferno. 
 
With the police baffled, lives endangered and Dante's literary future at stake, the Dante Club must shed its sheltered literary existence and find a way to stop the killer. 
 
 
Perfect for readers who like... 
<ul><li>Historical fiction with extensive period detail.</li><li>Literary puzzles, clues and scholarly investigation.</li><li>Ensemble casts caught up in a serial-killer investigation.</li></ul> 
Similar books to The Dante Club 
<ul><li>The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco</li><li>The Club Dumas by Arturo Pérez-Reverte</li><li>The Alienist by Caleb Carr</li><li>Inferno by Dan Brown</li></ul> 
Themes and story elements 
<ul><li>Murder and punishment</li><li>Literary obsession</li><li>Scholarly investigation</li><li>Intellectual rivalry</li><li>Serial murder</li><li>Dante's Inferno</li></ul>

A gripping thriller set in Boston, from the writer whose legion of fans include Dan Brown and Jed Rubenfeld

With intricate plots, classical themes, and erudite characters...what's not to love?

Dan Brown, author of Inferno and The Da Vinci Code

There are some great twists in the plot and the chase is genuinely thrilling...an unusually arresting piece of crime fiction

The momentum of his plot is irresistible...a most inventive page-turner

Audacious and captivating...truly admirable

A fascinating, erudite and highly entertaining account of a remarkable moment in American literary history

Not since Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose has a literary novel of such scholarly density enjoyed international success on quite such a massive scale... The momentum of his plot is irresistible...a most inventive page-turner

Brilliant and erudite thriller... Pearl is a young Dante expert...this is his first book and he knows how to sustain a narrative. Perfect for reading before the flickering fire

Working on a vast canvas, Mr. Pearl keeps this mystery sparkling with erudition...with this captivating brain teaser as his debut novel, seems also to have put his life's work on the line in melding scholarship with mystery. He does justice to both

Pearl's scholarly background is evident in the erudite detail he weaves into his fictional narrative, adding texture and complexity

A brilliant literary novel which manages to be academic without being dull, combining as it does scholarly density with page-turning suspense

Matthew Pearl is the new shining star of literary fiction - a heady, inventive, and immensely gifted author. With intricate plots, classical themes, and erudite characters...what's not to love?

Matthew Pearl is the internationally bestselling author of The Dante Club, published in more than thirty languages and forty countries. His other books include The Poe Shadow and The Last Dickens. Pearl is a graduate of Harvard University and Yale Law School and has taught literature at Harvard and at Emerson College. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Before Inferno came The Dante Club…the captivating thriller from the writer whose fans include Dan Brown, Jed Rubenfeld, Kate Mosse and Tess Gerritsen 
 
Boston, 1865. 
 
A small group of elite scholars prepare to introduce Dante’s vision of hell to America. 
 
Meanwhile a ruthless killer plots in secret to do the same. 
 
When a series of murders erupts through Boston and Cambridge, only this small group are able to decipher the clues – they soon realise the gruesome killings are symbols modeled on the descriptions of Hell's punishments from Dante's Inferno. 
 
With the police baffled, lives endangered and Dante's literary future at stake, the Dante Club must shed its sheltered literary existence and find a way to stop the killer. 
 
‘An immensely gifted author’ Dan Brown, bestselling author of Inferno and The Da Vinci Code

The Technologists

A heart-stopping thriller set in nineteenth-century Boston - a city threatened by a madman hell-bent on destruction.

THE TECHNOLOGISTS combines everything I love in a thriller: fascinating history, science, and a frightening mystery that demands to be solved. Matthew Pearl is one of my must-read authors. He never fails to intrigue and thrill

An ingenious, sometimes terrifying, historical thriller

Vivid…frightening… The Technologists is a marvel

Pearl takes an unusual subject for a thriller and seamlessly weaves historical research and his own inventions into a satisfying story

The social background is intriguing ... recommended

The best yet from a true master of the historical thriller. I loved this novel

Joseph Finder, author of Buried Secrets and Vanished

Pearl  takes an unusual subject for a thriller and seamlessly weaves  historical research and his own inventions into a satisfying story

Matthew Pearl and his research assistant, Gabriella Gage, certainly cannot be faulted on their historical work for this vast novel

Pioneers of academic science in the US become clue-hunting detectives in Pearl’s vivid, well-researched novel

A city held to ransom. A brave few determined to fight. A race against time. 
 
Spring 1868, and the population of Boston is being terrorised by a series of mysterious attacks: first a magnetic storm causes ships in the harbour to collide in flames, then in another bizarre catastrophe every piece of glass in the financial district spontaneously melts - clocks, windows, eyeglasses. The city's fate relies on four young students: Civil War veteran Marcus Mansfield, brash Bob Richards, meticulous Edwin Hoyt and the eccentric but brilliant Ellen Swallow. Together, they are The Technologists. In a climate of rising hysteria, these four courageous individuals must unite against the forces of darkness to uncover the mastermind before he can stage his greatest outrage.

The Last Dickens

'Matthew Pearl is the new shining star of literary fiction - an immensely gifted author' - Dan Brown

A plot packed full of incident, coincidences, devious twists and dramatic set pieces

Matthew Pearl's The Last Dickens is a tour-de-force . . . which grips the reader from harrowing start to tantalizing finish

Jed Rubenfeld, author of The Interpretation of Murder

An illuminating peep into a vanished world

1870. Charles Dickens is dead. 
 
The final instalment of his last manuscript has vanished. 
 
The script was last seen addressed to the publisher whose fortunes depend on it. Since its sudden disappearance the only clue to its whereabouts is a trail of brutal murders. 
 
With his livelihood - indeed his life - in jeopardy, Dickens' publisher sets out to unravel the mystery. The trail leads him from bustling West End theatres, through grimy East End backstreets, into the fug of illicit opium dens, as the crime he hopes to solve ensnares him.

The Poe Shadow

'Matthew Pearl is the new shining star of literary fiction - an immensely gifted author' - Dan Brown, author of The Da Vinci Code.

An imaginative, clever and satisfying literary detective story, bristling with the sights, smells and sounds of 19th century Baltimore - a real treat for Poe fans

Pearl does an ingenious job of shedding new light on the puzzle...brilliantly evokes the kind of dedication that Poe still enjoys

An absorbing combination of cerebral twists and visceral turns

Genuinely thrilling... An unusually arresting piece of crime fiction

A mind-twisting literary thriller...With nefarious characters, a Machiavellian plot and a denouement monologue to wow even Hercule Poirot, The Poe Shadow will keep you guessing

It's possible to imagine Edgar Allan Poe enjoying The Poe Shadow

This is a book full of surprising discoveries and reversals, but also a fascinating portrait of a society closer to fracture than anyone is prepared to admit...One of the novel's strength's is that it values intelligence, and the process of analytic thought as much as it does the sensational moments

Pearl's is an ambitious project; literary criticism, biography, reconstruction, reportage and fiction, all in one volume...Where else could you find all this and disquisitions on the slave trade, voter fraud in local elections and the workings of the US postal system?  And the truth about Edgar Allan Poe's death?

This is a story not for people who like reading novels but for the much larger number who like solving puzzles

Baltimore, 1849. The body of Edgar Allan Poe has been buried in an unmarked grave. The conclusion that Poe was a second-rate writer who died a drunkard is accepted by all. But none of this deters Quentin Clark, an ardent admirer who risks his own career and reputation in a passionate crusade to salvage Poe's. 
 
Clark discovers that Poe's last days are riddled with vital unanswered questions. But just when Poe's death looks destined to remain a mystery, Quentin seeks out the one person who can solve this strange case: the real-life model for Poe's brilliant fictional detective character, C. Auguste Dupin. 
 
Having successfully recruited the man he believes to have inspired Poe's Dupin, Clarke is confronted by another claiming to be the true model. The two master detectives each seek to prove he is the real 'Dupin' by solving the mystery of Poe's death. Clark finds himself enmeshed in sinister machinations involving international political agents, a female assassin, the corrupt Baltimore slave trade and the lost secrets of Poe's final hours. With his own future hanging in the balance, he must turn master investigator himself to unchain his now imperilled fate from that of Poe.

Matthew Pearl

A mixture of a classic heist and literary history lesson; the whole Victorian world of letters is cleverly and wittily reimagined

A historical jigsaw puzzle of literary larceny, deception, and derring-do…richly imagined

[Pearl’s] clever final twist will surprise the general reader, and please Stevenson scholars

An enthralling, unusual story, filled with adventure and deceit, that has something interesting to say about the perpetually tangled relationship between literature and commerce

It all plays out as an evocative Polynesian travelogue with all the audacious thievery of a fun heist film

Exciting and highly inventive, this fast-paced epic tale of literary skullduggery, criminal artistry, colonial conflict and reclusive writers is delightfully immersive

an erudite, thought provoking read, set within a lively, action filled atmosphere

Ingenious thriller… Pearl shows an admirable capacity for constructing an intriguing narrative around a nugget of historical information.

'An ingenious thriller' (Sunday Times) from the author of The Dante Club 
 
A reclusive writer…A stolen manuscript…An adventure at the ends of the earth 
 
On the island of Samoa, a dying Robert Louis Stevenson labours over a new novel. It is rumoured that this may be the author of Treasure Island’s greatest masterpiece. 
 
On the other side of the world this news fires the imaginations of the bookaneers, literary pirates who steal the latest manuscripts by famous writers. 
 
Two adversaries set out for the South Pacific: Pen Davenport, a tortured criminal genius haunted by his past and Belial, his nemesis. Both dream of fortune and immortality with what may be their last and most incredible heist. 
 
The Last Bookaneer thrillingly depicts the lost world of these doomed outlaws, a tropical island with a violent destiny, a brewing colonial war and a reclusive genius directing events from high in his mountain compound.

Matthew Pearl

Books by Matthew Pearl

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