Мэтью Перл – лучшие книги

Бостон, 1865 год. Несколько крупнейших американских поэтов заканчивают первый в Западном полушарии перевод "Божественной комедии", но Дантов Ад становится явью. Новая Англия потрясена целой серией садистских убийств виднейших добропорядочных граждан города, подлинных столпов общества. Поэт Лонгфелло, доктор Холмс и профессор Лоуэлл считают своим долгом понять, что перед ними - цепочка жутких мистических совпадений или же это сам великий флорентиец шестьсот лет спустя вернулся мстить за неправедное изгнание.

Бостон, 1865 год. Несколько крупнейших американских поэтов заканчивают первый в Западном полушарии перевод "Божественной комедии", но Дантов Ад становится явью. Новая Англия потрясена целой серией садистских убийств виднейших добропорядочных жителей города, подлинных столпов общества. Поэт Лонгфелло, доктор Холмс, профессор Лоуэлл и их издатель Филдз считают своим долгом понять, что перед ними - цепочка жутких мистических совпадений или сам великий флорентиец шестьсот лет спустя вернулся мстить за неправедное изгнание.
А потому мы желаем лишь одного - предупредить тебя, читатель. Если ты намерен изучать эту книгу дальше, вспомни сначала, что слова кровоточат.

В это издание историко-литературного триллера Мэтью Перла вошли новые материалы: предисловие автора к русскому изданию и Архив "Дантова клуба" - утраченные главы романа, не вошедшие в окончательное американское издание.

Таинственные преступления в Бостоне! Трагические пожары на кораблях в Бостонской гавани — в огненном хаосе погибли люди. Серия взрывов в центре города, в конторах и офисах — жертв стало еще больше. Трагические совпадения? Преступный умысел! Кто стоит за происходящим? За что и почему убивает? Полиция, ведущая дело, в недоумении. Горожане уверены: ужасные взрывы — дело рук самого дьявола. На помощь неожиданно приходит наука! За расследование берутся молодые ученые из недавно созданного Массачусетского технологического института, которому еще только предстоит стать колыбелью американской науки. Они намерены любой ценой найти и разоблачить таинственных преступников — и для этого воспользуются последними научными открытиями…

Эдгар Аллан По. Величайший американский писатель, гений декаданса, создатель жанра детектива. В жизни По было много тайн, среди которых – обстоятельства его гибели. Как и почему умирающий писатель оказался в благотворительной больнице? Что привело его к трагическому концу? Версий гибели Эдгара По выдвигалось и выдвигается множество. Однако поклонник творчества По, молодой адвокат из Балтимора Квентин Кларк, уверен: писателя убили. Врагов у По хватало – завистники, мужья соблазненных женщин, собратья по перу, которых он беспощадно уничтожал в критических статьях. Кто же из них решился на преступление? В поисках ответов Кларк…

Boston, 1870. When news of Charles Dickens’s untimely death reaches the office of his struggling American publisher, Fields & Osgood, partner James Osgood sends his trusted clerk Daniel Sand to await the arrival of Dickens’s unfinished novel. But when Daniel’s body is discovered by the docks and the manuscript is nowhere to be found, Osgood must embark on a transatlantic quest to unearth the novel that he hopes will save his venerable business and reveal Daniel’s killer.

Danger and intrigue abound on the journey to England, for which Osgood has chosen Rebecca Sand, Daniel’s older sister, to assist him. As they attempt to uncover Dickens’s final mystery, Osgood and Rebecca find themselves racing the clock through a dangerous web of literary lions and drug dealers, sadistic thugs and blue bloods, and competing members of Dickens’s inner circle. They soon realize that understanding Dickens’s lost ending is a matter of life and death, and the hidden key to stopping a murderous mastermind.

On a quiet midsummer day in 1776, weeks after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, thirteen-year-old Jemima Boone and her friends Betsy and Fanny Callaway disappear near the Kentucky settlement of Boonesboro, the echoes of their faraway screams lingering on the air.

A Cherokee-Shawnee raiding party has taken the girls as the latest salvo in the blood feud between American Indians and the colonial settlers who have decimated native lands and resources. Hanging Maw, the raiders’ leader, recognizes one of the captives as Jemima Boone, daughter of Kentucky's most influential pioneers, and realizes she could be a valuable pawn in the battle to drive the colonists out of the contested Kentucky territory for good.

With Daniel Boone and his posse in pursuit, Hanging Maw devises a plan that could ultimately bring greater peace both to the tribes and the colonists. But after the girls find clever ways to create a trail of clues, the raiding party is ambushed by Boone and the rescuers in a battle with reverberations that nobody could predict. As Matthew Pearl reveals, the exciting story of Jemima Boone’s kidnapping vividly illuminates the early days of America’s westward expansion, and the violent and tragic clashes across cultural lines that ensue.

In this enthralling narrative in the tradition of Candice Millard and David Grann, Matthew Pearl unearths a forgotten and dramatic series of events from early in the Revolutionary War that opens a window into America’s transition from colony to nation, with the heavy moral costs incurred amid shocking new alliances and betrayals.

Book publishing has always been a risky business. But in the 19th century, a set of loose copyright laws and a hungry reading public created a uniquely dangerous situation: books published in one country could be transferred--quickly, secretly, illegally--to another country and published without compensating the author. Famously, though Dickens made a fortune from his English publishers in America he hardly saw a dime since countless houses simply printed his work illegally; a hypothetical writer in France might learn that in Italy her books were being sold without her knowledge, and be powerless to stop it. Authors may have suffered, yet in some sense it was a golden literary age. For readers looking for the latest books at the cheapest prices, it was a dream come true; for publishers, with no financial obligation to the authors, it was like printing money.

This extraordinary underground economy was only possible thanks to a select class of literary pirates, derisively labeled as 'bookaneers.' For decades the bookaneers--like the unflappable Pen Davenport, the obsessive Whiskey Bill, the monstrous Belial, the femme fatale Kitten--were the knights of the literary world: fluent in dozens of languages and in the handwriting of countless famed authors; experts in book production and spycraft; travelers of the globe that viewed themselves as an elite caste who upheld the foundations of world literature. But at the close of the 19th century, a new international treaty was signed that united copyrights across national borders, and in the process doomed the trade of the bookaneer to extinction.

In The Last Bookaneer, bestselling novelist Matthew Pearl--author of The Dante Club--takes readers on the last, fantastic adventure of the bookaneers. Pen Davenport is one of the greatest bookaneers of the century, a principled but tortured genius with an uncanny ability to see through human deception. His assistant is a humble bookseller named Fergins, who hears through a dying colleague of an unimaginably rich heist deep in the South Pacific. Narrated by Fergins as he delves deeper and deeper into his master's world, The Last Bookaneer is a tremendously readable thriller illuminated by the greatest literary lights of the nineteenth century.

Davenport's last case is a mighty one. Robert Louis Stevenson--the legendary author of Treasure Island, Kidnapped!, and The Extraordinary Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde--has retreated to the island of Samoa to recuperate from a deadly illness. Reports reach Fergins which confirm that the great writer is feverishly working on some final masterpiece, but the book is threatened by Stevenson's health and his self-imposed isolation. To steal Stevenson's manuscript from under his very nose, and to sell it around the world just months before the copyright law goes into effect: that would be a triumph for the last of the bookaneers. In the great vein of Sherlock Holmes, Davenport is absolutely on the case.

Yet Davenport's pursuit is impaired from the outset. By the time Davenport and Fergins arrive on Samoa, their bitter rival Belial has already enscounced himself with the great writer, masquerading as a progressive missionary to worm his way into Stevenson's confidences. And the picturesque island is far less idyllic than it first appears: a colonial war is brewing between the German occupiers, the allied British and American forces, and the natives whose elected leader has been replaced--violently--with a false king loyal to the colonial powers. Deepening their friendship with Stevenson, discovering his devotion to the native people and his mysterious plans high on his mountain estate, Davenport and Fergins begin to realize that that this famed adventure writer is himself playing a dangerous game on the island, with unpredictable consequences. And the crucial manuscript has still never been seen.

Like Pearl's bestsell

A city held to ransom. A brave few determined to fight. A race against time.
Spring 1868, and the population of Boston is being terrorised by a series of mysterious attacks: first a magnetic storm causes ships in the harbour to collide in flames, then in another bizarre catastrophe every piece of glass in the financial district spontaneously melts - clocks, windows, eyeglasses. The city's fate relies on four young students: Civil War veteran Marcus Mansfield, brash Bob Richards, meticulous Edwin Hoyt and the eccentric but brilliant Ellen Swallow. Together, they are The Technologists. In a climate of rising hysteria, these four courageous individuals must unite against the forces of darkness to uncover the mastermind before he can stage his greatest outrage.