Boston. 1865. A small group of elite scholars prepares to introduce Dante`s vision of hell to America. But so does a murderer. The literary geniuses of the Dante Club
- poets & Harvard professors Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Dr Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Russell Lowell & publisher J. T. Fields
- are finishing America`s first translation of The Divine Comedy. The powerful old guard of Harvard College wants to keep Dante in obscurity, believing that the infiltration of such foreign superstitions will prove as corrupting as the immigrants invading Boston Harbor. The members of the Dante Club fight to keep their sacred literary cause alive, but their plans fall apart when a series of murders erupts through Boston & Cambridge. Only this small group of scholars realises that the gruesome killings are modeled on the descriptions of Hell`s punishments from Dante`s Inferno. With the police baffled, lives endangered & Dante`s literary future at stake, the Dante Club must shed its sheltered literary existence & find a way to stop the killer.