Rotten at the Heart: Being Wm Shakespeare's Account of His First Adventure As an Unwilling Intelligecer in Service to the Crown, As Relayed from His Recently Discovered Journals by Bartholomew Daniels

London, 1596. With their patron's mysterious death and their Puritan landlord's sudden determination to evict them, William Shakespeare and the Lord Chamberlain's Men teeter on the brink of ruin. So when the new Baron Carey--son of their late sponsor--reveals to Shakespeare his suspicions that his father was murdered, and demands that Shakespeare use his own powers of observation to ferret out the killer in exchange for Carey's continued patronage, Will has little choice but to agree. Shakespeare juggles his duties to his troupe with a desultory attempt at playing shamus, only to find himself attacked by a hooded swordsman, his reputation besmirched by a vicious anonymous pamphleteer, and his every move marked by a strange man with a hideously scarred and deformed nose. His professional life unraveling, Shakespeare must now face a personal life destroyed by the tragic consequences of a failed affair, the death of his son Hamnet, and his estrangement from his wife, Anne. Driven at last to serve the truth, Shakespeare uncovers plots inside plots--some stemming from historical ills, some from the new evils of the burgeoning stock exchange, and all seeming aimed as much at Shakespeare as at his late patron. Rooted in historical fact and written in Will's own accessibly Elizabethan voice, Rotten At the Heart explores the intersection of religion, politics, and corruption, and underscores the sacrifices that honor demands when a troubled man finally discovers his own.

Bartholomew Daniels is an avid book collector and it was through his purchase of a wooden chest of unwanted novels and forgotten papers at an estate sale in Illinois last year that he made the extraordinary discovery of several lost Shakespeare journals.
Bartholomew is also a close friend of novelist Dan O’Shea, who encouraged him to set about editing these manuscripts so that modern readers might be able to thrill to them also.

Bartholomew Daniels said: “Shakespeare the writer is the colossus of English literature. But Shakespeare the man is an enigma. These manuscripts I’ve been privileged enough to discover and edit cast new light on Shakespeare’s secret life as a detective in the cut-throat world of Elizabethan England.”

From his mother’s womb untimely ripped on April 23, 1959, Bartholomew, a Chicago-area writer, is a long-time Shakespeare aficionado, and sees the chance to edit the Bard’s lost journals detailing Shakespeare’s unfortunate adventures as an unwilling Elizabethan gumshoe as the chance of a lifetime. Mr. Daniels can be reached online at BartholomewDaniels@yahoo.com or you can follow him on Twitter as @BardBoiled. In real life, due to legal entanglements and security concerns surrounding the lost manuscripts, Mr. Daniels lives at a secure, undisclosed location.