When an old friend and colleague passes away, an LSU English professor named Jack Claire travels to Swansea, Wales, to attend the funeral and is bequeathed a cache of handwritten manuscripts, the plays of William Shakespeare, along with a rare, leather-bound copy of the First Folio —the first collection of Shakespeare’s plays. A problem arises, however, when he recognizes that the handwriting is NOT William Shakespeare’s. He returns to Baton Rouge with and attempts to authenticate the documents, inadvertently alerting a ruthless collector who covets these priceless literary artifacts. The collector hires a relentless mercenary to steal the Shakespeare papers. Benedict resorts to violence when his surreptitious searches fail.
In California, Joseph Lawrence Conrad, a handsome young college instructor, receives mysterious handwritten original plays of Shakespeare. Not an Elizabethan scholar, Joe Conrad seeks the help of a colleague named Jonathan Smitty Smythe, a literary Sherlock Holmes to Joe’s Watson. At once, Smitty recognizes the potential of the manuscripts and enlists the aid of Silvia Williamson, a brilliant and beautiful African-American scholar from Berkeley. As these three amateur sleuths labor to authenticate the manuscripts and determine the true author of Shakespeare’s plays, they learn someone is after the priceless papers —and he’s leaving a trail of bodies in his wake. Eventually, everyone connected to the Shakespeare papers is in danger, including Joe’s wife and children.
Plots intersect as the scholars discover evidence (based on thorough research) pointing to the most probable author(s) of Shakespeare’s works, while the ruthless collector grows closer to the prize. Along the way, Joe and the others are assisted by police detective Ryan Dunn, who saved Joe and his family years earlier, FBI Agent Terry Lott, who helps uncover the identity of the mercenary, and Bill Morgan, an attorney who assists in protecting the Shakespeare papers and the family.
This fast-paced journey of discovery takes these appealing characters from Louisiana to California, to Washington, DC, Oxford, England, Swansea, Wales, and back to London where they discover a surprising link to today’s Queen Elizabeth and the Royal Family, which ultimately leads Joe and Smitty to Stratford-upon-Avon, where they come face to face with a surprising and lethal truth.
Об авторе
Scott Evans holds a Master’s in English from the University of California, Davis, and teaches at the University of the Pacific in Central California, including fiction writing and a course titled Crime, Punishment and Justice that introduces first-year students to criminology from various perspectives. Before returning to California, he taught at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, which is one of the settings in his literary murder mysteries. These thrillers follow the misadventures of a resourceful, but nave young college instructor named Joseph Lawrence Conrad. Scott Evans is the Editor and Publisher of the Blue Moon Literary & Art Review, a literary journal that has featured work by New York Times best-selling authors John Lescroart and Rick Mofina, as well as Hollywood actor Patrick Kilpatrick. Father of three, he lives in Davis, California, with his wife, Cindy, a cancer survivor to whom the first book, Tragic Flaws, is dedicated. He has published numerous stories and poems, as well as newspaper articles, and was the recipient of the National Endowment for the Humanities Lectureship in Southern Literature in Louisiana in 1985. When he is not writing, teaching, scuba diving, or sailing on the San Francisco Bay, you will find Scott Evans listening to jazz and sipping a martini at a local bar while chatting about books with fellow writers.
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