The Club Dumas

Lucas Corso is a jaded mercenary book dealer hired for two jobs at once: to authenticate a handwritten chapter of a novel by Alexandre Dumas, and to track down and compare the three surviving copies of De Umbrarum Regni Novem Portis, a 1666 occult work reputed to contain a method for summoning the Devil. As Corso studies the books, he discovers that their engravings differ in tiny, deliberate ways, and that the discrepancies form a puzzle pointing toward which copy is genuine. His investigation draws devil worshippers, obsessed collectors, and a mysterious young woman into his path, and the literary mystery and the occult one begin to bleed into each other as Corso realizes he may have become a character inside someone else's plot.