Mask of Night: A Shakespearean Murder Mystery

Due to the plague, player Nicholas Reville and the Chamberlain's Company leave London in 1603 for Oxford, where a doctor performing in Romeo and Juliet winds up dead-and not of the pestilence. A not very credible villain, a lack of Oxford local color and a plot contrived to make Reville look overly courageous (or foolish), however, mar Philip Gooden's Mask of Night, the fifth novel in this otherwise solid historical series.