Much ADO about Murder Book

If it's true, as some wags have it, that there are only five plots in literature (and life), surely Shakespeare told them all. In Much Ado About Murder Anne Perry has rounded up 17 variations on his themes, in short stories that range in time and place from Jacobean London to the royal court of France, and from Plantagenet England to the Rome of Coriolanus. The authors of these carefully observed tales have already proven their talents in a host of more contemporary thrillers, although Perry herself is best known for her Victorian mysteries featuring William Monk, and Sharan Newman, a medieval historian, is comfortably at home in 12th-century France and late-Roman Britain. Aficionados of the Bard of Avon will find much to enjoy in this spirited collection, and even those with only a smattering of Shakespearean knowledge will find the themes timeless enough to ignore the authors' occasional anachronisms. --Jane AdamsRead More