October's Review of Club Dumas

We read Club Dumas by Arturo Perez-Reverte this past month and had a good discussion. Here's a quick synapsis from Reading Group Guides.Com:

"Rare-book sleuth Lucas Corso is hired to authenticate a manuscript chapter from Alexandre Dumas's The Three Musketeers, and to find the original copy of a manual for summoning the devil. These assignments lead him into dangerous waters as he becomes the target of devil worshipers, unscrupulous bibliophiles, and a cast of characters that seems to come straight out of Dumas's masterpiece, complete with a femme fatale and her sinister henchman. Aided by an enigmatic young beauty named for Sherlock Holmes's nemesis, Corso follows the violent trail of Dumas and the devil across Europe as he begins to uncover the dark and horrifying secret linking the two books. Arturo Pérez-Reverte has woven a brilliant intertextual puzzler, at once sophisticated and playful, in the tradition of Umberto Eco and Italo Calvino."

The 1999 movie, The Ninth Gate , directed by Roman Polanski was LOOSELY based on this book although it had some missing plot holes and the ending was different. But this is par for the course with Hollywood.

Born in Cartagena, Spain, Arturo Pérez-Reverte is currently one of the most successful Spanish language writers reaching best seller standards in many countries. After leaving his home country, Pérez-Reverte worked on oil tankers during the 1970s before becoming a journalist first for a Spanish newspaper, covering former Spanish African colonies in conflict (Western Sahara and Equatorial Guinea), and then for television reporting from Bosnia. Following four novels that were not particularly successful, fame arrived with The Fencing Master and continued with The Flanders Panel (that won France's Grand Prize for Detective Literature), The Club Dumas (nominated for a Macavity award in 1988) and The Seville Communion. He has also written an historical series featuring Capitán Alatriste that has yet to be translated in English. Pérez-Reverte's latest translated novel is The Nautical Chart.

GROUP RATINGS (1-5, 5 being the best book ever, 1 being total rubbish)
Val - 4
Amy - 3
Cathie - 3 (no dogs)
Will - 4
Kevin - 5
Stephenie - 3.5
Total Rating = 3.75