The Club Dumas

<b>A rare book investigator gets caught in a deadly plot among Europe's elite literati in this acclaimed thriller—"a cross between Umberto Eco and Anne Rice" ( <i>New York Daily News</i>).</b> <br> Lucas Corso is a book detective, a middle-aged mercenary hired to hunt down rare editions for wealthy and unscrupulous clients. When a well-known bibliophile is found dead, leaving behind part of the original manuscript of Alexandre Dumas's <i>The Three Musketeers</i>, Corso is brought in to authenticate the fragment. <br> Corso is soon drawn into a swirling conspiracy involving devil worship, occult practices, and swashbuckling derring-do among a cast of characters bearing a suspicious resemblance to those of Dumas's masterpiece. Aided by a mysterious beauty named for a Conan Doyle heroine, Corso travels from Madrid to Toledo to Paris on the killer's trail in this twisty intellectual romp through the book world. <br> <b>"Erudite, funny, loopy, brilliant . . . action-adventure spied with dollops of idiosyncrasy—and some very good talk." — <i>The Philadelphia Inquirer</i> </b>