Book Review: Much Ado About Murder: All-New Shakespeare-Inspired Mystery Stories

Reviewed By: Harriet Klausner

Much Ado About Murder: All-New Shakespeare-Inspired Mystery Stories     Amazon US PB Amazon US HC Amazon Canada PB Amazon Canada HC
Anne Perry
Class/Genre:   Mystery   [Short Stories]
Berkley, Dec 2002, $23.95, 339 pp.

All seventeen tales in this enchanting mystery collection depicts the world is an Elizabethan stage. Well known genre writers fill the anthology with strong sounds and fury making for an entertaining time for the spectators, but several are particularly excellent plays on Shakespeare’s works leading to a quality rarely seen in a short story collection. The best stories are those that follow the Tom Stoppard approach (see Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead) by employing characters and allusions from the Bard’s works with a twist like placing protagonists into a legal thriller or changing the focus of whom is the star. Except perhaps soliloquies of heresy from English literature professors or a complaint from the Dark Lady, MUCH ADO ABOUT MURDER is much ado about entertainment as Will is modernized by a genre crowd that pays homage to the great one in an all’s well anthology.

Harriet Klausner

Reprinted with permission. Do Not repost without permission from the author, Harriet Klausner