The Book of Air and Shadows.

Gruber, Michael (author).

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Codes ’n’ classics have shown some staying power despite even the so-so prose of both the book that started the avalanche, The Da Vinci Code, and its imitators. The plot summary of The Book of Air and Shadows—ciphered seventeenth-­century letters found in a rare book trigger a race to find an undiscovered Shakespeare play—might seem like yet another rubbing of the grail were it not for Gruber’s intelligence and engaging style. This big bibliothriller stars a self-loathing, weightlifting intellectual-property lawyer; a timid wannabe film student; and a prickly bookbinder with a mysterious past, all marginally allied against untrustworthy scholars, Russian mobsters, and a mystery man. Though he ambitiously uses three different time lines and three points of view, Gruber deftly raises the thriller stakes and accelerates the plot while still creating convincing personal journeys for his characters. Even better, he finds time to thoughtfully explore related concepts, such as the ways movies inform our behavior and the nature of industries built to profit on creativity. All that and a tantalizing imagining of Shakespeare’s personality, too. Try Ross King’s Ex-Libris (2001) and Jim Nisbet’s Syracuse Codex (2005) for two wildly different but related takes.