The Dante Game — Jane Langton

IN MAGNIFICENT, MYSTERIOUS FLORENCE, HOMER KELLY DISCOVERS A CITY AS CORRUPT AND DEADLY TODAY AS IT WAS IN DANTE'S TIME

Sleuthing Harvard Professor Homer Kelly has come to Italy to teach at the struggling American School for Florentine Studies. What starts innocently as "the Dante Game" takes a sinister turn when the school's Italian maid and her lover are found--quite dead--on the school's grounds. Then the school's most talented (and ravishingly beautiful) student disappears. Meanwhile, in another corner of Florence, Signor Bindo, a highly respected banker, is gnashing his teeth over His Holiness's successful antidrug campaign, which is ruining his tidy heroin business. It isn't long before he decides to take matters into his own hands.

Homer soon finds himself embroiled in a mystery as complex as Dante's divine poem itself--one that culminates in a hair-raising papal visit to Florence' spectacular duomo.