Matthew Pearl

"A deliciously intricate and utterly absorbing retelling of the Daniel Boone family saga---and particularly the complex roles played by the Cherokee and Shawnee across Boone's southern Appalachian stamping grounds. The Taking of Jemima Boone adds an intriguing dimension to an issue of keen importance to modern society."--New York Times bestselling author Simon Winchester "Not only did Matthew Pearl's clear and vivid writing immediately sweep me up in a father's fear, it pulled me into a larger and even more profound story, one that would change the course of three nations--one young, two ancient, all fighting for survival."--Candice Millard, bestselling author of The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey "It seemed Jemima Boone's fate to be taken hostage--if not by Kentucky Indians then by fiction and legend. Even a cousin had a go at her story, in verse. Sensitively and eloquently, writing his way around the silences, Matthew Pearl rescues her at last. Fearlessness seemed to run in the family; Jemima could neither read nor write, yet had an uncanny ability to communicate with her father, conspiring with him from a distance, assisting with his rescue, under gunfire, at close hand. A rousing tale of frontier daring and ingenuity, better than legend on every front."--Pulitzer Prize-winning author Stacy Schiff In his first work of narrative nonfiction, Matthew Pearl, bestselling author of acclaimed novel The Dante Club, explores the little-known true story of the kidnapping of legendary pioneer Daniel Boone's daughter and the dramatic aftermath that rippled across the nation. On a quiet midsummer day in 1776, weeks after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, thirteen-year-old Jemima Boone and her friends Betsy and Fanny Callaway disappear near the Kentucky settlement of Boonesboro, the echoes of their faraway screams lingering on the air. A Cherokee-Shawnee raiding party has taken the girls as the latest salvo in the blood feud between American Indians and the colonial settlers who have decimated native lands and resources. Hanging Maw, the raiders' leader, recognizes one of the captives as Jemima Boone, daughter of Kentucky's most influential pioneers, and realizes she could be a valuable pawn in the battle to drive the colonists out of the contested Kentucky territory for good. With Daniel Boone and his posse in pursuit, Hanging Maw devises a plan that could ultimately bring greater peace both to the tribes and the colonists. But after the girls find clever ways to create a trail of clues, the raiding party is ambushed by Boone and the rescuers in a battle with reverberations that nobody could predict. As Matthew Pearl reveals, the exciting story of Jemima Boone's kidnapping vividly illuminates the early days of America's westward expansion, and the violent and tragic clashes across cultural lines that ensue. In this enthralling narrative in the tradition of Candice Millard and David Grann, Matthew Pearl unearths a forgotten and dramatic series of events from early in the Revolutionary War that opens a window into America's transition from colony to nation, with the heavy moral costs incurred amid shocking new alliances and betrayals.

The True Story of the Kidnap and Rescue That Shaped America

The Taking of Jemima Boone

In 1849 Baltimore, following the death of Edgar Allan Poe, Quentin Clark discovers that Poe's final days had been marked by a series of bizarre, unanswered questions, and launches his own investigation to resolve the mystery of Poe's death.

A Novel

The Poe Shadow

The bestselling author of The Dante Club takes us deep into a shadowy era in publishing ruled by a forgotten class of criminals A golden age of publishing on the verge of collapse. For a hundred years, loose copyright laws and a hungry reading public created a unique opportunity: Books could be published without an author's permission with extraordinary ease. Authors gained fame but suffered financially?Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Robert Louis Stevenson, to name a few?but publishers reaped enormous profits while readers got their books on the cheap. The literary pirates who stalked the harbors, coffeehouses, and printer shops for the latest manuscript to steal were known as bookaneers. Yet on the eve of the twentieth century, a new international treaty is signed to protect authors and grind this literary underground to a sharp halt. The bookaneers, of course, would become extinct. In The Last Bookaneer, Matthew Pearl gives us a historical novel set inside the lost world of these doomed outlaws and the incredible heist that brought their era to a close. On the island of Samoa, a dying Robert Louis Stevenson labors over a new novel. The thought of one last book from the great author fires the imaginations of the bookaneers, and soon two adversaries?the gallant Pen Davenport and the monstrous Belial?set out for the south Pacific island. Pen Davenport?a tortured criminal genius haunted by his past?is reluctantly accompanied by Fergins, the narrator of our story, who has lived a quiet life of bookselling before being whisked across the world on his friend's final caper. Fergins soon discovers the supreme thrill of aiding Davenport in his quest: to steal Stevenson's manuscript and make a fortune before the new treaty ends the bookaneers' trade forever. Yet Samoa holds many secrets of its own, and the duo's bookish concerns clash with the island's violent destiny. A colonial war is afoot between the British, American, and German powers; even as Stevenson himself quietly supports native revolutionaries from high in his mountain compound. Soon Pen and Fergins are embroiled in a conflict larger, perhaps, than literature itself. Illuminating the heroics of the bookaneers even while conjuring Stevenson himself to breathtaking life, Pearl's The Last Bookaneer is a pageturning journey to the dark heart of a forgotten literary era.

The Last Bookaneer

Before Inferno came The Dante Clubâe¦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 Danteâe(tm)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 âe" 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. âe~An immensely gifted authorâe(tm) Dan Brown, bestselling author of Inferno and The Da Vinci Code

The Dante Club

The first graduating class at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is thrown into turmoil by bizarre phenomena that cause instruments to inexplicably spin out of control, challenging enterprising students to protect lives while combating Harvard rivals.

The Technologists

Pearl reopens one of literary history's greatest mysteries, in a tale filled with the dazzling twists and turns, the unerring period details, and the meticulous research that thrilled readers of bestsellers "The Dante Club" and "The Poe Shadow."

The Last Dickens

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Before The Dante Chamber, there was The Dante Club: “an ingenious thriller that . . . brings Dante Alighieri’s Inferno to vivid, even unsettling life.”—The Boston Globe

“With intricate plots, classical themes, and erudite characters . . . what’s not to love?”—Dan Brown, author of The Da Vinci Code and Origin

Boston, 1865. The literary geniuses of the Dante Club—poets and Harvard professors Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, and James Russell Lowell, along with publisher J. T. Fields—are finishing America’s first translation of The Divine Comedy. The powerful Boston Brahmins at Harvard College are fighting to keep Dante in obscurity, believing the infiltration of foreign superstitions to be as corrupting as the immigrants arriving at Boston Harbor.

But as the members of the Dante Club fight to keep a sacred literary cause alive, their plans fall apart when a series of murders erupts through Boston and Cambridge. Only this small group of scholars realizes that the gruesome killings are modeled on the descriptions of Hell’s punishments from Dante’s Inferno. With the lives of the Boston elite and Dante’s literary future in the New World at stake, the members of the Dante Club must find the killer before the authorities discover their secret.

Praise for The Dante Club

“Ingenious . . . [Matthew Pearl] keeps this mystery sparkling with erudition.”—Janet Maslin, The New York Times

“Not just a page-turner but a beguiling look at the U.S. in an era when elites shaped the course of learning and publishing. With this story of the Dante Club’s own descent into hell, Mr. Pearl’s book will delight the Dante novice and expert alike.”—The Wall Street Journal

“[Pearl] ably meshes the . . . literary analysis with a suspenseful plot and in the process humanizes the historical figures. . . . A divine mystery.”—People (Page-turner of the Week)

“An erudite and entertaining account of Dante’s violent entrance into the American canon.”—Los Angeles Times

“A hell of a first novel . . . The Dante Club delivers in spades. . . . Pearl has crafted a work that maintains interest and drips with nineteenth-century atmospherics.”—San Francisco Chronicle

"The year is 1870. Five years after a series of Dante-inspired killings disrupted Boston, a man is found murdered in the public gardens of London with an enormous stone around his neck etched with a verse from the Divine Comedy. When more mysterious murders erupt across the city, all in the style of the punishments Dante memorialized in Purgatory, poet Christina Rossetti fears her brother, the Dante-obsessed artist and writer Gabriel Rossetti, will be the next victim. Christina enlists poets Robert Browning and Alfred Tennyson, and famous scholar Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, to assist in deciphering the literary clues. Together these unlikely investigators rush to unravel the secrets of Dante's verses in order to find Gabriel and stop the killings. Racing between the shimmering mansions of the elite and the dark corners of London's underworld, they descend further and further into the mystery. But when the true inspiration behind the gruesome murders is finally revealed, Christina realizes that the perpetrator has even bigger and more horrific plans than she had initially thought"--

The Dante chamber

Matthew Pearl’s upcoming novel, The Technologists, is a stunning historical thriller based on the early days of America’s great institution of learning, MIT—and a depraved killer teaching Boston to fear its own shadow. In this original eBook short story, Pearl delves further into the turbulent world of nineteenth-century academia to re-create a shocking, real-life, and all-but-forgotten crime. William Barton Rogers will one day become MIT’s founder and president. But in 1840 he is still a science professor at the University of Virginia. A tall and commanding intellectual, he epitomizes the strong and liberal ways of “Mr. Jefferson’s University,” a controversial experiment in progressive thought and laissez-faire governance. Then a startling event rocks the school to its foundation. Riots led by masked “volunteers” have begun roiling the campus, exploiting its attitude toward discipline. When one of his colleagues is brutally slain during the unrest, Rogers must become a man of both words and deeds to capture the killer—and keep an essential institution from collapsing around him. Includes a preview of Matthew Pearl’s forthcoming novel, The Technologists, which Joseph Finder calls “the best yet from a true master of the historical thriller.”

The Professor's Assassin (Short Story)

Thriller

Der Dante-Club

Last Bookaneer

El club Dante

A man convicted of murdering his wife finds an unlikely champion in this short story by the bestselling author of The Dante Club. Our narrator is a man convicted of first-degree murder with only one person on his side: Ginnifer. After seeing him on TV and becoming obsessed with the case, Ginnifer devotes herself to overturning his sentence. Eventually, Ginnifer's friendship turns into something more--but the closer they become, the more the relationship turns into a prison of its own. "Ginnifer" by Matthew Pearl is one of 20 short stories within Mulholland Books's Strand Originals series, featuring thrilling stories by the biggest names in mystery from the Strand Magazine archives. View the full series list at mulhollandbooks.com and listen to them all!

Ginnifer

Into the Shadows

Company Eight

Isabel Andrade

O clube de Dante

O Livro Inacabado de Dickens

“This swashbuckling tale of greed and great literature will remind you why Pearl is the reigning king of popular literary historical thrillers. His latest is guaranteed to delight lovers of history and mystery.”—Library Journal (starred review) book'a-neer' (bŏŏk'kå-nēr'), n. a literary pirate; an individual capable of doing all that must be done in the universe of books that publishers, authors, and readers must not have a part in London, 1890—Pen Davenport is the most infamous bookaneer in Europe. A master of disguise, he makes his living stalking harbors, coffeehouses, and print shops for the latest manuscript to steal. But this golden age of publishing is on the verge of collapse. For a hundred years, loose copyright laws and a hungry reading public created a unique opportunity: books could easily be published without an author’s permission. Authors gained fame but suffered financially—Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Robert Louis Stevenson, to name a few—but publishers reaped enormous profits while readers bought books inexpensively. Yet on the eve of the twentieth century, a new international treaty is signed to grind this literary underground to a sharp halt. The bookaneers are on the verge of extinction. From the author of The Dante Club, Matthew Pearl, The Last Bookaneer is the astonishing story of these literary thieves’ epic final heist. On the island of Samoa, a dying Robert Louis Stevenson labors over a new novel. The thought of one last book from the great author fires the imaginations of the bookaneers, and soon Davenport sets out for the South Pacific island. As always, Davenport is reluctantly accompanied by his assistant Fergins, who is whisked across the world for one final caper. Fergins soon discovers the supreme thrill of aiding Davenport in his quest to steal Stevenson’s manuscript and make a fortune before the new treaty ends the bookaneers’ trade forever. But Davenport is hardly the only bookaneer with a mind to pirate Stevenson’s last novel. His longtime adversary, the monstrous Belial, appears on the island, and soon Davenport, Fergins, and Belial find themselves embroiled in a conflict larger, perhaps, than literature itself. In The Last Bookaneer, Pearl crafts a finely wrought tale about a showdown between brilliant men in the last great act of their professions. It is nothing short of a page-turning journey to the heart of a lost era.

The public, the press, and even Poe?s own family and friends accept the conclusion that Poe was a second-rate writer who died a drunkard?everyone except a young Baltimore lawyer named Quentin Clark.

Matthew Pearl

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