A long-lost work of Shakespeare, newly found....a killer who stages the Bard's extravagant murders as flesh-and-blood realities...a desperate race to find literary gold, and just to stay alive....
On the eve of the Globe's production of Hamlet, Shakespeare scholar and theater director Kate Stanley's eccentric mentor gives her a mysterious box, claiming to have made a groundbreaking discovery. But before she can reveal it to Kate, terrifying echoes of the past break through to the present: The Globe burns, and a body is found inside - murdered in the strange manner of Hamlet's father. Opening the box, Kate finds the first piece in a Shakespearean puzzle that sets her off on a deadly, high-stakes treasure hunt, racing from England to Spain to America.
An expert in occult Shakespeare, Kate knows better than anyone the many secrets, half-truths, codes, and curses surrounding his life and work. On the trail of a four-hundred-year-old mystery, she soon realizes that the prize at the end promises to unlock literary history's greatest secret.
