Saturday, January 5, 2008

#31: Reading

I did a lot of reading over the holidays! I finished this book just a couple of days ago--and I really enjoyed it. "Interred with Their Bones" by Jennifer Lee Carrell is fast-paced, intriguing, and hard to put down. I can see a comparison to the Da Vinci Code since a lot of the book deals with clues that are history-based, but this book has a follow up at the end that reveals all the facts used in creating the story, which was fascinating to me. I knew a lot of the controversy surrounding Shakespeare's identity, but I thought this was a clever was of showing different sides of the debate--with action, adventure & romance thrown in.
From Publishers Weekly:

Plot twists worthy of The Da Vinci Code dominate this agile first novel from Carrell (The Speckled Monster: A Historical Tale of Battling Smallpox), a thriller involving a lost Shakespeare play, The History of Cardenio. On a June day in 2004, at London's rebuilt Globe theater, Rosalind Howard, flamboyantly eccentric Harvard Professor of Shakespeare, gives her friend Katharine Stanley, who's directing a production of Hamlet at the Globe, a small gold-wrapped box. That evening, a fire damages the Globe, where Roz is found murdered in the same manner as Hamlet's father. Roz's mysterious gift, which contains a Victorian mourning brooch decorated with flowers associated with Ophelia, propels Kate on a wild and wide-ranging quest that takes her to Utah; Arizona; Washington, D.C.; and back to London. Every step of the way, as the bodies pile up, Kate narrowly escapes becoming the next murder victim. From Shakespeare conferences to desert mines, from the present to the past, this spirited and action-packed novel delivers constant excitement.

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