Michael Gruber, The Book of Air and Shadows

The Book of Air and Shadows

Michael Gruber

Morrow, Apr 2007, $24.95

ISBN 0060874465

Manhattan-based intellectual property lawyer Jake Mishkin enjoys the good life of the Big Apple until his life changes when his college roommate Columbia Professor Mickie Haas sends visiting Oxford Professor Andrew Bulstrode to see him on a legal matter. As he waits for the killers to pay their respects to him, Jake muses that if the woman with the long neck at the New York Public Library was not involved he would not have dived so deeply.

The mess truly began with the fire in an antiquarian bookstore where wannabe filmmaker Albert Crosetti worked before Andrew's consultation with Jake and subsequent murder. Jake meets Albert and they soon follow encrypted clues left behind by sixteenth-century British spy Richard Bracegirdle on 48 sheets hidden inside the 1732 six volumes of Churchill's Collection of Voyages and Travels that claims a Shakespeare manuscript exists. As they begin their trek from Queens to England where the encrypted Bracegirdle's letters send them to find this literary treasure, neither trusts anyone including their partner as double cross is everywhere while gangsters working for an unknown party also pursue them.

The key to THE BOOK OF AIR AND SHADOWS is the characters whose personal lives interwoven into the suspense make them seem real as the audience understands much about Mishkin, Crosetti and even Bracegirdle. This leads to better comprehending the traitorous actions of the cast. Fans will enjoy this deep saga that uses Shakespeare as the focus of a twenty-first century thriller.

Harriet Klausner