Shakespeare, rare books, murder and mystery

This book drew me with the title alone, but when I read the blurb and discovered that it was about finding and restoring rare books, a cross-century literary mystery, Shakespeare, conspiracy, murder and mayhem, I knew this one was for me.

The protagonist is a young American man named Peter Byerly, an antiquarian bookseller with an obsessive attraction to rare books and an equally obsessive aversion to social interaction. Byerly has become a virtual recluse since the death of his beloved Amanda nine months earlier, and has relocated to a small town in the English countryside where he hides out in a cottage and nurses his grief. A brief visit to a local bookstore, however, leads to his discovery of a Victorian-age watercolor portrait which is stunningly like his dead wife, and his efforts to hunt down the origins of the painting and the mystery artist known only by his signature “B.B” forces Byerley back to life and onto the trail of a multi-century set of clues and a possible Shakespeare forgery that ends up in murder.

As Byerly follows the clues down through the centuries, author Lovett gives us alternating chapters from the present time and from the age of Shakespeare so that we can explore—in modern libraries and in historic time–the passage of the reputed Shakespeare folio from hand to hand as it makes it ways down to the present time and into Byerly’s lap. Lovett also devotes a full chapter to the process of restoration of books, which some might find tedious but this bibliophile found absolutely delicious! He also throws in the Oxford vs Stratford theories of whether Shakespeare really wrote Shakespeare, for a little seasoning to the stew. The story is rather convoluted and takes a lot of concentration to keep the ages and the characters straight, but the payoff is worth it in the end.