Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, one of an elite group of literary geniuses secretly working on America's first translation of "The Divine Comedy" in 1865, puts his career on the line when he teams up with outcast police officer Nicholas Rey in an attempt to find a killer who is patterning his crimes on descriptions of Hell's punishments from Dante's "Inferno."

"This book explores resilience by tracing the linked stories of how Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and William James dealt with personal tragedy: for Emerson, the death of his young wife and, eleven years later, his five-year-old son; for Thoreau, the death of his brother; and for James, the death of his beloved cousin Minny. Weaving together biographical detail with quotations from the writers' journals and letters, Richardson shows readers...