The Last Dickens » (Unabridged)

In the work of Matthew Pearl, fact and fiction seamlessly blend, and from this provocative brew, strange mysteries emerge. The literary giants of history -- Longfellow, Dante, Poe -- become the subjects and solvers of puzzling thrillers. Pearl s masterful novels The Dante Club and The Poe Shadow bridge the gap between literature and popular fiction, winning him international praise from critics and readers, no matter how high their brows may be.

Matthew Pearl reopens one of literary history’s greatest mysteries in his most enthralling novel yet, a tale filled with the dazzling twists and turns, the unerring period details, and the meticulous research that thrilled readers of bestsellers The Dante Club and The Poe Shadow.

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 Dickens’s unfinished novel–The Mystery of Edwin Drood. 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 will save his venerable business and reveal Daniel’s killer.

Danger and intrigue abound on the journey, for which Osgood has chosen Rebecca Sand, Daniel’s older sister, to help clear her brother’s name and...

Publishers Weekly

Bestseller Pearl (The Poe Shadow) delivers a period thriller that has the misfortune to fall short of the high standard set by Dan Simmons's Drood(Reviews, Nov. 24), which also centers on Charles Dickens's final, unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. After the author dies in 1870, a series of suspicious deaths leads Dickens's U.S. publisher, James Osgood, to suspect they may be connected with the solution to the novel's puzzle. Accompanied by attractive bookkeeper Rebecca Sand, the sister of one of the victims, Osgood travels from Boston to England to seek clues to Drood's missing conclusion. The action shifts to India, where Charles's son Francis is a superintendent of the Bengal Mounted Police, and back in time, to the novelist's last American tour in 1867. Some awkward prose distracts ("There were several other grim faces at dinner that, like some imperceptible force, spread a dark cloud over the levity"), while the ending may strike some readers as a cop-out. (Mar.)

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