Ooh, underwhelmed, I like that. The story was intriguing, but it was SO drawn out. I definitely did not care too much for the main character, so I didn’t feel very involved. Maybe I’ll try reading The Dante Club…

The Poe Shadow, Matthew Pearl’s second novel after The Dante Club, builds a story around the mystery surrounding the death of Edgar Allen Poe. The circumstances surrounding Poe’s death have never been fully explained, though many have tried over the years. In The Poe Shadow, the hero of the story, one Quentin Clark, an admirer and correspondant of Poe, takes it upon himself to investigate the writer’s death and restore his good name and reputation after he is witness to the tiny, anonymous funeral Poe is given and the subsequent slander of his name and writing talents by the press. From Baltimore to Washington to Paris, Clark searches out people close to Poe and those who were witness to events in his final days. Pearl bases many of these characters on his research of real people involved in the mystery and keeps their names unchanged. Clark enlists the help of a Parisian detective whom he believes to be the inspiration for a detective character in many of Poe’s stories, along the way accidently involving in the investigation another Parisian detective out to restore his own good name through his triumphant resolution of the mysterious circumstances surrounding Poe’s death. The investigation continues as a battle between the respective detectives for the “truth” as obsession with restoring Poe’s good name takes over Clark’s life, threatening both his career as a lawyer, his engagement, and his family’s opinions of his sanity.

I enjoyed The Dante Club more. Not really a bad book, but The Dante Club left me with high expectations for Pearl’s next book, and Shadow was disappointing. I was, to borrow a word from a good friend, underwhelmed.