The action centres around Kate Stanley, an American academic who is making her directorial debut by staging Hamlet at The Globe theatre in London. All is going well – she even has a big-name actor starring as the ghost of Hamlet's father – when she receives an unexpected visit from her former mentor Rosalind Howard. Roz has come to ask for Kate's help in solving a mystery, and before Kate has time to accept the plot lurches away into a breathless sequence of fires, murders and thefts.

In this particular aspect, the story reads much like Dan Brown's: the heroine and her male sidekick race across Britain and America following clues which must be solved before they can move on to their next location, encountering a string of extraordinarily violent deaths that are all staged to replicate some of Shakespeare's most famous death scenes: Ophelia drowning, Caesar's assassination.
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