The Club Dumas

Summary:

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 The Three Musketeers, Corso is brought in to authenticate the fragment. He 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 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. (Summary and cover courtesy of goodreads.com)

Review:

Typically, I absolutely adore a book with the least amount of literally context, but this book has proven to break the trend for me.  Despite being familiar with “The Three Musketeers”, I am no aficionado, which meant many references went straight over my head.  It was also the type of book that doesn’t make much sense until the end until all is revealed.  In the context of a Sherlock Holmes story, I love that kind of setup.  In this case, there were multiple plot lines in parallel and that meant I’m still not 100% sure that I understood how each unraveled from each other.

If each story had been unraveled from each other, I think I would have enjoyed it more, but with both of them contradicting each other, it felt a little random to me and likely they weren’t fully developed.  Because I was up for being along for the ride and enjoyed some historical contexts, the book still gets 3-stars from me, but it’s just barely.

Warning: Contains sexual content and violence.

Rating: 3 stars!

Who should read it? Fans of classic books and the Three Musketeers.

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