"Did I just kill William Shakespeare?" The question hammered through James's mind as he fled the arena, gasping for fresh air, of which there was none in that hell-hole of a city...Sometimes, time travel isn't all it's cracked up to be as James Reilly discovers when he journeys to Elizabethan England to solve a long debated question: Did Shakespeare really write the plays attributed to him? When his investigation leads to nothing but a violent confrontation between him and the Bard, he returns to the future to ask the most renowned time-traveler of the day, who also happens to be his mother, Dr. Cassandra Reilly, to go with him to London of 1598 and use her charms to make inroads where he has failed. Once immersed in the era, Cassandra finds herself becoming intimate with the key players of the time: Shakespeare and his troupe, Queen Elizabeth, Ben Jonson, Robert Cecil, and Edward De Vere - the Earl of Oxford. However, navigating the perils that lie around every corner of London of that day, as well as the whims of the unpredictable queen, makes it a hazardous undertaking, especially when three men are vying to win Cassandra's heart, and a mysterious presence seems to be stalking her.