Staff Picks Blog
Michael Gruber has written three perfectly good supernaturally-tinged thrillers, set in Miami–Tropic of Night, Valley of Bones, and Night of the Jaguar. He’s really raised the stakes though with his new novel, The Book of Air and Shadows. It’s much more ambitious than his earlier books, weaving together three narrative strands.
One is the first-person narration of Jake Mishkin, former olympic weight lifter, womanizer, intellectual property lawyer, mess. He’s entrusted with documents which suggest the existence of an unknown Shakespeare play, and the person who gave them to him is killed.
Second, we see Albert Crosetti, nerd and film school wannabe, discovering the documents, under suspicious circumstances. Let’s just say there’s a femme fatale involved, whose loyalty is in question. Russian gangsters, too.
Finally, we have the documents themselves, a series of letters (some ciphered) by Richard Bracegirdle to his wife and the nobleman who’s set him spying on William Shakespeare. Trying to prove the playwright’s Catholic sympathies, Bracegirdle suggests a play about Mary, Queen of Scots that would rally sentiment against the Puritans. If it was actually written, if it survived, if the whole thing isn’t an elaborate hoax, this could be the most valuable portable object on earth.
The ciphers, and revelations about a cultural icon, of course suggest that Gruber is slipping into Da Vinci Code territory. While both books are expertly constructed thrillers, Jake Mishkin is way more fascinating a character than Dan Brown’s Robert Langdon.
[...] Here we are, quickly approaching the start of summer, and I find myself reading another book that has to do with Shakespeare. I’ve never really been much of a Shakespeare fan…well, I like him and his works enough, but I’m not a fanatic or anything, driven to read every work written by or about him, or even to see every movie that is a rendition of one of his works (Hamlet with Ethan Hawke, yes; 10 Things I Hate About You, no). And yet, I often find myself reading novels that feature him not only as a theme in the plot, but also as a character. Last summer it was The Sonnet Lover by Carol Goodman, in which our sonnet-loving protagonist finds herself at a villa in Florence, unraveling a couple mysteries, one of them having to do with whether or not Shakespeare spent time in Italy (where many of his plays take place), and another having to do with the identity of a certain dark lady. Then it was The Book of Air and Shadows by Michael Gruber, which focuses on the tantalizing idea of a newly-discovered Shakespeare play, as well as the myriad sorts of people who would do just about anything to have it (previously mentioned here). Now, I’m reading Interred With Their Bones by Jennifer Carrell, in which our theatrically-inclined heroine follows a trail of clues that might or might not lead to a copy of Cardenio (one of the lost Shakespeare plays), as well as the discovery of the identity of a certain dark lady, all the while leaving burnt theatres and libraries in her wake. [...]