Don't get me wrong. I spend most of my time (and money) in the sci fi and mystery sections of the local mall's bookstore. However, every once in a while I wander past those familiar haunts and try to find something a little bit meatier. This book was the fruit of one such jaunt.
Back in late Spring, in preparation for my first international vacation, I picked up this little gem after a friend, who knows my love of the works of Umberto Eco, mentioned the author, Arturo Pérez-Reverte. While The Club Dumas isn't quite as involved as Eco's The Name of the Rose or Foucault's Pendulum (which, by the way, is very Season 2 Millennium-istic), it had enough twists and turns to give me a bit of a headache.
That's a good thing in case you didn't know.
It all begins with a simple request. Our hero, Lucas Corso, a disreputable and therefore frequently successful, rare-book hunter, is sent on two seemingly disparate quests. One is to authenticate a rough draft of a chapter from Alexandre Dumas' classic The Three Musketeers. The other is to discover which of the three copies of The Book of the Nine Doors of the Kingdom of Shadows - a guide book that is supposed to detail how to summon the devil - is the authentic one, and which two the forgeries.
The only problem is that starting off early in his adventures, bodies begin to pile up around Corso. Events conspire to never allow him to be certain which of his assignments has turned him into a messenger of death and so he continues on blindly, at turns both confounded and aided by a mysterious woman who goes by the name of the only person to outwit Sherlock Holmes, The Woman a.k.a. Irene Adler.
While the above description might not sound very genre, I'm afraid that if I said any more I'd ruin the book for you. So if, like me, you dig books that screw with your head a bit, The Club Dumas is just what you're looking for.
And if that's not good enough, then just pick it up so you can picture Johnny Depp as Corso, the role he plays in the upcoming film adaptation of the book (entitled The Ninth Gate). Hey, it would have worked for me.
-- Linda M. Najera
The Club Dumas, published by Vintage International/Vintage Books/Random House, is currently available in paperback.
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