Peter Byerly is a young bookseller, grieving the death of his beloved wife, Amanda, the granddaughter of a woman who endowed a great book collection at a small private college. Byerly leaves their North Carolina home for the cottage they renovated in England. While in a small bookshop he finds a small watercolor portrait in a book that looks amazingly like Amanda but was painted in the 1800s. He begins a search for information about the mysterious artist "BB" and soon finds himself sucked into mystery, intrigue, and danger surrounding the "Pandosto" manuscript which Shakespeare may have actually used in writing his plays. The action covers multiple time periods from Shakespearean times, to the 19th Century, to Peter and Amanda's college romance in the 1980s to present day. The author, an antiquarian bookseller/collector and playwright, provides a meticulously detailed story that can be a bit confusing a times but I never found it boring. However the ending seemed just a little too precious.
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