A review by karynhuenemann
Shakespeare's Secret by Elise Broach

2.0

Yet another knock off—this time from Balliett’s Chasing Vermeer and The Wright 3. The heroine, Hero, and her sister, Beatrice, are named after the women in Much Ado About Nothing, as their father is a Shakespeare scholar. The mystery to be solved involves a lost diamond, and the literary history connected with it is the question of whether someone other than William Shakespeare wrote the plays. Elizabethan and pre-Elizabethan British history is thus a learning component of the story, but while the history seems sound, the reader is left possibly believing the critical opinion that Edward de Vere did write the plays… there is not enough hard evidence surrounding this question for the reader to form a solid opinion—which isn’t surprising as the evidence is rather thin and has been exploited to fill up the missing plot elements in this portion of the story. The result is misleading at best, and nowhere near the quality of Balliett’s integration of history, art, architecture, math, science, and the notion of coincidence.