You hear the name "William Shakespeare" right off the bat in relation to a book’s topic, and you instantly think of thrills, chills, action, adventure, and mystery, right? Well, you should, you know, because you might be one of the lucky ones whose optimism pays off - for instance, in the case of Jennifer Lee Carrell’s remarkable novel of twists, turns, murders, and maddeningly conniving Elizabethan politics, Interred with Their Bones. The book involves the search for one of Shakespeare’s lost plays, Cardenio, a script that is potentially worth millions of dollars. It is a play that could rekindle ancient scandals and potentially resolve the question about who the true author of the First Folio plays credited to William Shakespeare actually was.

When Shakespearian expert Katherine Stanley, set to direct Hamlet at the Globe Theatre in London, takes the job and hires Sir Henry Lee for the role of the ghost of Hamlet’s father, little does she suspect that it will lead to death of one of her best friends, Roz, and a fire that almost destroys the recreated Globe. It is no coincidence that the fire is on June 29th., a Tuesday. The conflagration that destroyed the original Globe was on June 29th - in 1613. Whoever is behind the fire and the death of Rosalind Howard wants to be as theatrical as possible, even staging the Roz’s death to resemble the murder of Hamlet’s father.

Both deaths involve poison and ears. The king has a poison identified as “hebona” poured into his ear as he sleeps by Claudius, his brother; Roz is injected with something more mundane, but just as deadly, behind her right ear:

“It was potassium. So much for the mysterious ‘juice of cursed hebona in a vial.’ Nothing more than a simple solution of potassium, injected into her neck. Easily found, easily used, quickly fatal, and virtually untraceable.”

“If you open it, you must follow where it leads.”

“Some playgoers found her last night, floating in the archive’s koi pond, her hair rippling like a mermaid’s, her skirt spread wide about her. She was drowned.”

She’d been transformed into Ophelia.