The author of The Dante Club and The Poe Shadow has fashioned another sleight-of-hand historical mystery that keeps us guessing from almost the first page. Again, master prestidigitator Matthew Pearl sets up with a simple double conundrum: In the jungles of India, a policeman shouts out the name of Charles Dickens while chasing a felon, while halfway around the world, a Boston publishing house clerk loses his life and the advance installment of Dickens's never-finished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. The Last Dickens casts its spells between these polar events, conspiring to make us both careful textual detectives and fearless street sleuths. A challenging intellectual entertainment.