Interred with Their Bones: Jennifer Lee Carrell

The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones."
--William Shakespeare

American Ph.D Katherine Stanley has spent her life studying Shakespeare and, for someone of her young age, has achieved an impressive feat: directing Hamlet at London's newly-rebuilt Globe Theatre. Things seem to be progressing nicely until her estranged mentor makes a dramatic entrance with a gold-wrapped gift for Kate, and the instructions that no matter what, if she opens the gift, she must follow where it leads. Kate's mockery of the gift lasts only until a fire ravages the theatre and her mentor, Roz, is found dead in the same manner as Hamlet's father. With that and Roz's gift, a Victorian mourning brooch decorated with flowers representing Ophelia, Kate is off and running.

To figure out the mystery that Roz has thrust into her hands Kate must cross the ocean, back to Roz's office at Harvard but to do that will take a miracle. The police have told her not to leave. With the help of Sir Henry, one of her actors, she finds her way back to America, and quickly discovers the depth of the plot that she is involved in. Allies and enemies shift in the space of a heartbeat and Kate learns that the only person she can really trust in the end is herself. As she runs cross-country from Boston to the Shakespeare Archive in Utah; an eerie re-creation of Hamlet's castle in Tombstone to a Shakespeare debate in Washington, D.C. and back across the water to London Kate will have to keep her cards, letters, books, and discoveries close to her vest. Her life is on the line and the body count is piling up behind her in frightening echoes of Shakesperian deaths. The one awaiting her will be the worst of all.

I can't say enough times how much I thoroughly enjoyed this book. And frankly, though I keep hearing comparisons to The Da Vinci Code there is no real comparison. This book is far better. The scholarship is dead-on accurate, the writing is amazing, and the plot-twists were fascinating but believable. The "Shakespeare authorship question" has raged in academic and literary circles since the 18th century (I have my own opinions on the matter and I don't favor the man from Stratford) and the author has done an incredible job of weaving a wonderful and neatly-cinched plot around the whole idea. In fact, I plowed through it so fast that I might just have to read it again.
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Hardcover: 432 pages
Publisher: Dutton Adult (September 20, 2007)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0525949704
ISBN-13: 978-0525949701
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