
Who hath done it? Shakespeare was the master of fiendish plots, devious motives, and murderous passions. But have you ever wondered what might happen to all those fascinating characters after the lights go down? Or what fate has in store for the audience, the players, or the author? New York Times bestselling authors Anne Perry and Jeffery Deaver, Ellis Award-winner Peter Robinson, and a stellar cast of today's finest mystery authors have come up with a few rapier-sharp answers of their own - but whatever your poison, each story assures us that Shakespeare lives one... and the rest of us are quite mortal indeed. Contents: All the world's a stage / Jeffery Deaver—Those are pearls that were his eyes / Carole Nelson Douglas—The fall of the house of Oldenborg / Robert Barnard—Jack hath not his Jill / Sharan Newman—Gracious silence / Gillian Linscott—A dish of poison / Lillian Stewart Carl—Too many cooks / Marcia Talley—Squinting at death / Edward Marston—Exit, pursued / Simon Brett—Richard's children / Brendan DuBois—This world's eternity / Margaret Frazer—Cleo's asp / Edward D. Hoch—Much ado about murder / Kathy Lynn Emerson—The serpent's tooth / P.C. Doherty—The duke's wife / Peter Robinson—Let the game begin / Peter Tremayne—Ere I killed thee / Anne Perry.
Authors

Margaret Frazer is a pen name used at first by Mary Monica Pulver Kuhfeld and Gail Lynn Frazer writing in tandem for a series of historical medieval mysteries featuring Dame Frevisse. After the sixth novel, the works are written by Gail Frazer alone, and the name has subsequently been used exclusively by her. A second series of novels by Ms Frazer set in the same time and place feature the player/minstrel Joliffe. See also: Monica Ferris, Mary Monica Pulver Series: * Sister Frevisse * Joliffe

Gillian Linscott introduced her popular suffragette/sleuth, Nell Bray, in the critically acclaimed Sister Beneath the Sheet. A BBC reporter turned full-time writer, she lives in Herefordshire, England. Linscott has also published several titles under the pseudonym Caro Peacock.

Carole Nelson Douglas is the author of sixty-four award-winning novels in contemporary and historical mystery/suspense and romance, high and urban fantasy and science fiction genres. She is best known for two popular mystery series, the Irene Adler Sherlockian historical suspense series (she was the first woman to spin-off a series from the Holmes stories) and the multi-award-winning alphabetically titled Midnight Louie contemporary mystery series. From Cat in an Alphabet Soup #1 to Cat in an Alphabet Endgame #28. Delilah Street, PI (Paranormal Investigator), headlines Carole's noir Urban Fantasy series: Dancing With Werewolves, Brimstone Kiss, Vampire Sunrise, Silver Zombie, and Virtual Virgin. Now Delilah has moved from her paranormal Vegas to Midnight Louie, feline PI's "Slightly surreal" Vegas to solve crimes in the first book of the new Cafe Noir series, Absinthe Without Leave. Next in 2020, Brandi Alexander on the Rocks. Once Upon a Midnight Noir is out in eBook and trade paperback versions. This author-designed and illustrated collection of three mystery stories with a paranormal twist and a touch of romance features two award-winning stories featuring Midnight Louie, feline PI and Delilah Street, Paranormal Investigator in a supernatural-run Las Vegas. A third story completes the last unfinished story fragment of Edgar Allan Poe, as a Midnight Louie Past Life adventure set in 1790 Norland on a isolated island lighthouse. Louie is a soldier of fortune, a la Puss in Boots. Next out are Midnight Louie's Cat in an Alphabet Endgame in hardcover, trade paperback and eBook Aug. 23, 2016. All the Irene Adler novels, the first to feature a woman from the Sherlock Holmes Canon as a crime solver, are now available in eBook. Carole was a college theater and English literature major. She was accepted for grad school in Theater at the University of Minnesota and Northwestern University, and could have worked as an editorial assistant at Vogue magazine (a la The Devil Wears Prada) but wanted a job closer to home. She worked as a newspaper reporter and then editor in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. During her time there, she discovered a long, expensive classified advertisement offering a black cat named Midnight Louey to the "right" home for one dollar and wrote a feature story on the plucky survival artist, putting it into the cat's point of view. The cat found a country home, but its name was revived for her feline PI mystery series many years later. Some of the Midnight Louie series entries include the dedication "For the real and original Midnight Louie. Nine lives were not enough." Midnight Louie has now had 32 novelistic lives and features in several short stories as well. Hollywood and Broadway director, playwright, screenwriter and novelist Garson Kanin took Carole's first novel to his publisher on the basis of an interview/article she'd done with him five years earlier. "My friend Phil Silvers," he wrote, "would say he'd never won an interview yet, but he had never had the luck of you." Carole is a "literary chameleon" who's had novels published in many genres, and often mixes such genre elements as mystery and suspense, fantasy and science fiction, romance with mainstream issues, especially the roles of women.

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. A pseudonym used by Keith Miles AKA A.E. Marston Keith Miles (born 1940) is an English author, who writes under his own name and also historical fiction and mystery novels under the pseudonym Edward Marston. He is known for his mysteries set in the world of Elizabethan theatre. He has also written a series of novels based on events in the Domesday Book, a series of The Railway Detective and a series of The Home Front Detective. Series contributed to: . Malice Domestic . Crime Through Time . Perfectly Criminal

1 international bestselling author of over thirty novels and three collections of short stories. His books are sold in 150 countries and translated into 25 languages. His first novel featuring Lincoln Rhyme, The Bone Collector, was made into a major motion picture starring Denzel Washington and Angelina Jolie. He's received or been shortlisted for a number of awards around the world.

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. Peter Robinson was born in Yorkshire. After getting his BA Honours Degree in English Literature at the University of Leeds, he came to Canada and took his MA in English and Creative Writing at the University of Windsor, with Joyce Carol Oates as his tutor, then a PhD in English at York University. He has taught at a number of Toronto community colleges and universities and served as Writer-in-Residence at the University of Windsor, 1992-93. Series: * Inspector Banks Awards: * Winner of the 1992 Ellis Award for Best Novel. * Winner of the 1997 Ellis Award for Best Novel. * Winner of the 2000 Anthony Award for Best Novel. * Winner of the 2000 Barry Award for Best Novel. * Winner of the 2001 Ellis Award for Best Novel.

aka Kaitlyn Dunnett, Kate Emerson, Kaitlyn Gorton Kathy Lynn Emerson began writing as a child: a newspaper for her dolls and then a rambling adventure series featuring characters from all her favorite television shows. In addition to contemporary, historical and time-travel romance (some written under the pen-name of Kaitlyn Gorton) and historical novels written as Kate Emerson, Kathy has written children's books, non-fiction, short stories, and historical mysteries. She won the Agatha award for mystery nonfiction for How to Write Killer Historical Mysteries. At present, she writes two contemporary cozy mystery series as Kaitlyn Dunnett and maintains a website for the e-book “A Who’s Who of Tudor Women” at TudorWomen.com. Her stand alone historical mystery, The Finder of Lost Things, was published in October 2020.

Sharan Newman is a medieval historian and author. She took her Master’s degree in Medieval Literature at Michigan State University and then did her doctoral work at the University of California at Santa Barbara in Medieval Studies, specializing in twelfth-century France. She is a member of the Medieval Academy and the Medieval Association of the Pacific. Rather than teach, Newman chose to use her education to write novels set in the Middle Ages, including three Arthurian fantasies and ten mysteries set in twelfth-century France, featuring Catherine LeVendeur a one-time student of Heloise at the Paraclete, her husband, Edgar, an Anglo-Scot and Solomon, a Jewish merchant of Paris. The books focus on the life of the bourgeoisie and minor nobility and also the uneasy relations between Christians and Jews at that time. They also incorporate events of the twelfth-century such as the Second Crusade and the rise of the Cathars. For these books, Newman has done research at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique France Méridionale et Espagne at the University of Toulouse and the Institute for Jewish History at the University of Trier, as well as many departmental archives. The Catherine Levendeur mysteries have been nominated for many awards. Sharan won the Macavity Award for best first mystery for Death Comes As Epiphany and the Herodotus Award for best historical mystery of 1998 for Cursed in the Blood. The most recent book in the series The Witch in the Well won the Bruce Alexander award for best Historical mystery of 2004. Just for a change, her next mystery, The Shanghai Tunnel is set in Portland in 1868. The Shanghai Tunnel allowed Sharan Newman to explore the history of the city she grew up in. She found that the history she had been taught in school had been seriously whitewashed. Doing research in the city archives as well as the collections at Reed College and the Oregon Historical society was exciting and eye-opening. Many of the “founding fathers” of Portland turn out to have been unscrupulous financiers. Chinese workers were subject to discrimination and there was an active red light district. On the other hand, Portland in the post-Civil War period also saw some amazingly liberal movements. Women’s rights were an important issue as was religious toleration. Even at that early date, preserving the natural environment was hotly debated. This is the world in which Emily Stratton, the widow of a Portland merchant and the daughter of missionaries to China, finds herself. Newman has written a non-fiction book, The Real History Behind the Da Vince Code Berkley 2005. It is in encyclopedia format and gives information on various topics mentioned in Dan Brown’s novel. Following on that she has just completed the Real History Behind the Templars published by Berkley in September of 2007. She lives on a mountainside in Oregon. (Text taken from: http://www.sharannewman.com/bio.html )
Edward D. Hoch is one of the most honored mystery writers of all time. * 1968 Edgar Allan Poe Award (Mystery Writers of America): "The Oblong Room", The Saint Mystery Magazine, July 1967 * 1998 Anthony Award (Bouchercon World Mystery Convention): "One Bag of Coconuts", EQMM, November 1997 * 2001 Anthony Award (Bouchercon): "The Problem of the Potting Shed", EQMM, July 2000 * 2007 Ellery Queen Readers Choice Award (awarded 2008): "The Theft of the Ostracized Ostrich", EQMM, June 2007 * Lifetime Achievement Award (Private Eye Writers of America), 2000 * Grand Master (Mystery Writers of America), 2001 * Lifetime Achievement Award (Bouchercon), 2001

Author bio: Lillian Stewart Carl's work often features paranormal/fantasy themes and always features plots based on mythology, history, and archaeology. Most of her novels take place squarely in the twenty-first century, where the past lingers on into the present, especially in the British Isles, Lillian's home away from home. She is the author of nineteen novels so far, including the Jean Fairbairn/Alasdair Cameron mystery series—-America's exile and Scotland's finest on the trail of all-too-living legends. Her newest novel is Fairbairn/Cameron number six, THE MORTSAFE. Of her mystery, fantasy, and sf short stories, twelve are available in a collection titled ALONG THE RIM OF TIME, and thirteen, including three from "Best Of the Year" anthologies, are collected in THE MUSE AND OTHER STORIES OF HISTORY, MYSTERY, and MYTH. All of Carl's work is available in electronic as well as paper form. She has also co-edited (with John Helfers) a retrospective of Lois McMaster's Bujold's science fiction work, titled THE VORKOSIGAN COMPANION, which was nominated for a Hugo award.

Marcia Talley is the Agatha and Anthony award-winning author of DEAD MAN DANCING and six previous mysteries featuring amateur sleuth, Hannah Ives who, like the author, is a breast cancer survivor. Marcia is author/editor of two star-studded collaborative novels, NAKED CAME THE PHOENIX and ID KILL FOR THAT set in a fashionable health spa and an exclusive gated community, respectively. Her short stories appear in more than a dozen collections including With Love, Marjorie Ann and Safety First, both Agatha award nominees, and the multi-award-winning Too Many Cooks, a humorous retelling of Shakespeares Macbeth from the viewpoint of the three witches. A recent story, Driven to Distraction won the Agatha Award, was nominated for an Anthony, and was reprinted in THE DANGEROUS BRIDE AND 21 OF THE YEARS FINEST CRIME AND MYSTERY STORIES. Marcia is immediate past president of the Chesapeake Chapter of Sisters in Crime, serves as Secretary for Sisters in Crime National, and is on the board of the Mid-Atlantic Chapter of the Mystery Writers of America. She divides her time between Annapolis, Maryland and an antique sailboat in the Bahamas. "


Aka Bernard Bastable. Robert Barnard (born 23 November 1936) was an English crime writer, critic and lecturer. Born in Essex, Barnard was educated at the Royal Grammar School in Colchester and at Balliol College in Oxford. His first crime novel, A Little Local Murder, was published in 1976. The novel was written while he was a lecturer at University of Tromsø in Norway. He has gone on to write more than 40 other books and numerous short stories. Barnard has said that his favourite crime writer is Agatha Christie. In 1980 he published a critique of her work titled A Talent to Deceive: An Appreciation of Agatha Christie. Barnard was awarded the Cartier Diamond Dagger in 2003 by the Crime Writers Association for a lifetime of achievement. Under the pseudonym Bernard Bastable, Robert Barnard has published one standalone novel and three alternate history books starring Wolfgang Mozart as a detective, he having survived to old age. Barnard lived with his wife Louise in Yorkshire. Series: * Perry Trethowan * Charlie Peace