The questions, discussion topics, and author biography that follow are intended to enhance your group's reading and discussion of Arturo Pérez-Reverte's novel, The Club Dumas. We hope they will enrich your understanding of this dazzling intellectual thriller.

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.