DV: What We're Reading: The Club Dumas by Arturo Perez-Reverte

		Perez-Reverte, Arturo. The Club Dumas. (New York: Vintage, 1998) List price14.00 Our price $12.60. Trade Paperback. New. Suspense/Mystery/Horror ISBN: 0679777547
Lucas Corso, middle-aged, tired, and cynical, is a book detective, a mercenary hired to hunt down rare editions for wealthy and unscrupulous clients. When a well-known bibliophile is found hanged, leaving behind part of the original manuscript of Alexandre Dumas's The Three Musketeers, Corso is brought in to authenticate the fragment. The task seems straightforward, but the unsuspecting Corso is soon drawn into a swirling plot involving devil worship, occult practices, and swashbuckling derring-do among a cast of characters bearing a suspicious resemblance to those of Dumass' masterpiece. Aided by a mysterious beauty named for a Conan Doyle heroine, Corso travels from Madrid to Toledo to Paris in pursuit of a sinister and seemingly omniscient killer. Part mystery, part puzzle, part witty intertextual game, The Club Dumas is a wholly original intellectual thriller by the internationally bestselling author of The Flanders Panel and The Seville Communion.

WHAT THEY'RE SAYING "A thriller of marvelous intricacy." -- New York Times Book Review "Erudite, funny, loopy, brilliant ... action-adventure spiced with dollops of idiodyncracy -- and some very good talk." -- Philadelphia Inquirer. "A noir metafiction ... Even a reader armed with a Latin dictionary and a copy of The Three Musketeers cannot anticipate the thrilling twists of this stylish, Escher-like mystery." -- The New Yorker

WHAT WE'RE SAYING Highly Recommended -- Lydia. One day, my friend Ken called to recommend a book ... I knew that Ken had been reading Alexander Dumas (pere) so I wondered which of Dumas' hundreds of novels Ken was going to rave about. Instead, he pointed me to a mystery by the Spanish journalist-turned-novelist Arturo Perez-Reverte. A novel about the hunt for a book ... but not just any book -- this one can open the doors to Hell. By way of passing, I mentioned a film I'd watched with a similar theme. We began to compare notes and pretty soon we were trading, "That's in the book!" with "That's in the movie!" And with good reason. According to the Internet Movie Database Roman Polanski's, The Ninth Gate starring Johnny Depp, is an adaptation of the novel *The Club Dumas... well sorta. It's really an adaptation of the "B" plot of what is a fantastic novel. Ever since I read it I've been virtually inhaling everything Perez-Reverte has put out. He's that good. The Club Dumas* is intelligently written. There's danger and pathos, not to mention a great deal of information about books and collecting. Perez-Reverte's characters are as mysterious as his mystery is convoluted. The novel engages the reader fully as a palpable feeling of deja vu blossoms into a very real supernatural threat. It is, as one critic so aptly put it: "... a cross between Umberto Eco and Anne Rice."