The Shakespeare Secret, by J. L. Carrell
Sphere, £6.99

The Crystal Skull, by Manda Scott
Bantam, £12.99

Shakespeare got away with murder. Repeatedly. It is astonishing how many of his characters come to an untimely end, from Polonius stabbed behind the arras to King Duncan, victim of Lady Macbeth's bloody daggers.

So when the Shakespearean scholar-turned-director Kate Stanley finds her friend and mentor Roz killed in a way that eerily resembles the murder of Hamlet's father she is naturally suspicious. Not least because this coincides with a fire at the rebuilt Globe Theatre, the theft of a first folio of the bard's work and a gift from Roz pointing her towards a secret treasure.

J.L. Carrell's novel The Shakespeare Secret develops into a hide-and-seek chase of murder and mayhem in which Harvard University's Widener Library is torched, more folios vanish and one murder after another is committed in admirably theatrical style.

We even have a professor knifed à la Julius Caesar on the steps of the Capitol in Washington, but - understandably - Kate is most worried by what the killer who whispers in her ear might be planning for her. He quotes from the stage directions for Titus Andronicus: “Enter Lavinia, her hands cut off, her tongue cut out and ravished.” The search for what the clues suggest may be the holy grail of Shakespearean study - a missing play and perhaps confirmation of his real identity - takes Kate to the Wild West, where we learn the bard's plays were popular with 19th-century miners.

So we visit a replica Globe in Utah and a ghost town named Shakespeare in Arizona, while Kate is surrounded with a cast of fellow seekers, from a knighted actor to a former SAS soldier of fortune, but who can she trust?

Jennifer Lee Carrell is a Shakespeare scholar and wrote her thesis on his influence in the American West, so she knows what she is talking about. But the American version was entitled Interred With Their Bones, which is certainly truer to the spirit. Which leads me to think the publishers - how sad is this? - felt they would do better by dumbing it down for the British market. The ghost they clearly hope to evoke is that of The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown's dumber-than-dumb bestseller, with Shakespeare scholarship substituted for religious hokum. Carrell omits Brown's ridiculous howlers but follows his penchant for twists, turns and incessant violence.

The weight of history and scholarship may prove a challenge for those who thought The Da Vinci Code was remotely intellectual, but this at least deserves a place on the same bookshelves.

The same cannot be said for Manda Scott's The Crystal Skull, which tinkers in the same genre, evoking Mayan legends, environmental catastrophe and a skull that might have been made by Damien Hirst. Unfortunately it goes nowhere. Laboriously.

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