The Dead Hamlets

Book excerpt: The immortal hero of The Mona Lisa Sacrifice turns from art history to a literary mystery. “A fun, and whip-smart, read.” —National Post Something is rotten in the court of the faerie queen. A deadly spirit is killing off the faerie, and it has mysterious ties to Shakespeare’s play, Hamlet. The only one who can stop it is the immortal Cross, a charming rogue who also happens to be a drunk, a thief, and an angel killer. He is no friend of the faerie since they stole his daughter and made her one of their own. When it appears she may be the next victim of the haunting, though, he must race against time to save her. He encounters an eccentric and deadly cast of characters along the way: the real Witches of Macbeth, the undead playwright/demon hunter Christopher Marlowe, an eerie Alice from the Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland books, a deranged and magical scholar—and a very supernatural William Shakespeare. When Cross discovers a startling secret about the origins of Hamlet itself, he finds himself trapped in a ghost story even he may not be able to escape alive. “The Dead Hamlets resembles something written by Neil Gaiman with its somewhat mystical imagery, and at other times it reads as a full-blown work of bizarro fiction.” —The Examiner