From Publishers Weekly
In Smith's (A Citizen of the Country) compelling mystery/love story about a self-professed "hick from Vermont," window installer/Shakespeare scholar Joe Roper discovers evidence in a university archive that might refute the Bard's authorship of his hallowed canon. If Joe announces his find, it could make his career as a literary scholar-but it would also mean betraying his beloved mentor, Roland Goscimer, who's on the cusp of publishing part two of his long-awaited Shakespeare biography. Posy Gould, a flashy, aggressive Harvard student, who believes the Earl of Oxford is the author of the canon, jets with Joe to England to resolve the matter by sleuthing through libraries, graveyards, castles and stately homes-and, vicariously, through the glitter and duplicity of the Elizabethan stage and court. Smith, a Harvard Ph.D., knows academia can be as hazardous as cocktails with the Borgias and renders that world well, while making the Shakespeare authorship controversy as riveting as any film noir plot bursting with bodies. She's also a sharp yet economical stylist who can capture a character in a couple of sentences: "The woman in the doorway looked like Princess Diana, if Princess Diana had lived until fifty and worked real hard on the bulimia.... Silvia was goggle-eyed, with an asphalt road of eyeliner on each lid." This is a complex book about attachment and ambition, the clash of class and culture, with its settings-Boston and Britain-vividly drawn. It's a worthy addition to Smith's already impressive output.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Smith, who recently completed a historical-suspense trilogy (
The Vanished Child, 1992;
The Knowledge of Water, 1996;
A Citizen of the Country, 2000), here turns to a literary mystery. Joe Roper, a blue-collar boy with ambition, attends Northeastern and has been selected to catalog an extensive collection of Elizabethan materials going back 100 years, donated by a rich businessman. Privileged Posy Gould, a glamorous Harvard grad student, is miffed that Joe has been put in charge of the collection. She talks him into jetting off to London to authenticate a letter signed by Shakespeare, admitting that he was merely a front for the true author of the plays. Joe, enamored of the Goulds' expensive London digs and the exotic Posy, suddenly finds he is in way over his head. Although the research details, quoted liberally here, are sometimes murky, Smith shines in her evocation of both the exhilaration of scholarship ("God is a librarian") and the vast breadth of Shakespeare's knowledge ("he'd been in every dark place that is").
Joanne WilkinsonCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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