Guilty by Definition was published too recently to be considered as part of my Mystery and Detective Fiction course, but it would probably have made it in as a student selective rather than a required text. In creating a world with imagined Shakespeare-related artifacts, it would serve as a fair companion to Ngaio Marsh's Death at the Dolphin (for which, q.v.). But it isn't quite as tightly plotted or filled with carefully-delineated characters.
Since this book is so recent, I'll be even more careful to avoid spoilers. But if you get ten pages in, you'll find out that anonymous letters with quotes from Shakespeare have started arriving at the offices of a major historical dictionary, perplexing and challenging the employees. Here's the first such letter and a bit of the reaction to it:
This establishes the pattern: A cryptic message arrives, the office starts to take it apart, some time passes (to give readers a chance to solve it, too), and then the solution is given. One of the flaws of the novel is that the pattern soon becomes formulaic.
Nonetheless, word enthusiasts, Shakespeare aficionados, and mystery lovers can enjoy this novel—even if there's little or no overlap in the Venn Diagram of those audiences. And there's a Shakespeare-related item that figures largely—but I'll leave it to you to read the book and find out that part.
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(and to support Bardfilm as you do so).
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