For Harvey Wells, ‘the time really is out of joint’. The last place Harvey, a modern American ex-cop-turned-private-eye thought his case would take him is London, England, four centuries into the past. It’s the London of William Shakespeare, Francis Bacon, the Earl of Essex and Queen Elizabeth the First. You see, thanks to the STUMP, a super-secret high technology device, time travel isn’t the stuff that dreams are made of anymore. For Wells, the slight hitch of having to journey 400 years back to a different time and place is just one of the ‘perks’ to overcome in his search for the man or woman who put a bullet into his best friend Dave McCreedy’s skull.

Along the way to track down Dave’s killer, he takes on Dave’s last client, the famed movie and stage actress Ann Benchley, a moody waning Hollywood star who’s playing Cleopatra on and off stage at her father’s Oregon-based Shakespeare Festival. She wanted Dave to find her missing father before the FBI did –a little matter of daddy vanishing without a trace–except for the body of his dead mistress in the trunk of his car. Wells thinks he can handle two jobs at once, but can be handle Ann’s sexy secretary, Bonnie Noel? Bonnie is as smart as she is beautiful, but is really on Harvey’s side or just leading him on to protect her boss?

At the vortex of this trail of blood and deception lies the ‘good folks’ at The Institute for Factual History. The IFH is a high-level, hush-hush outfit with a project to convince the modern world that somebody besides Shakespeare wrote all his famous plays. The leader of this outfit Harvey has to crack into is one Trevor Warbeck, a big time actor-turned-politician with a big vendetta against the Benchley family, and his even bigger corporate sponsor Sherwood Strunk (of the mega-media Strunk Network.) Neither they nor their well-armed underlings will hesitate to eliminate anybody who pokes their nose into their clandestine doings.

Is Harvey Wells being set-up, or is he somewhere near the right track? With such a list of suspects stretching from the actors and crew of the Northwest Shakespeare Festival to the back alleys of San Francisco and then modern and Renaissance London, he’d better solve the case fast if he expects to get back alive to his own country and his own time. Otherwise, he’s bound for that undiscovered country, where no traveler returns.