Jake Mishkin's seemingly innocent job as an intellectual property lawyer has put him at the center of a deadly conspiracy and a chase to find a priceless treasure involving William Shakespeare.
As he awaits a killer---or killers---unknown, Jake writes an account of the events that led to this deadly endgame, a frantic chase that began when a fire in an antiquarian bookstore revealed
the hiding place of letters containing a shocking secret, concealed for four hundred years. In a frantic race from New Yorkto England and Switzerland, Jake finds himself matching wits with a
shadowy figure who seems to anticipate his every move. What at first seems like a thrilling puzzle waiting to be deciphered soon turns into a dangerous game of cat-and-mouse, where no one---not
family, not friends, not lovers---is to be trusted. Moving between twenty-first-century America and seventeenth-century England, this is a modern thriller that brilliantly re-creates
Shakespeare's life at the turn of the seventeenth century and combines an ingenious and intricately layered plot with a devastating portrait of a contemporary man on the brink of
self-discovery...or self-destruction.
