The exuberant world of Elizabethan theater once again takes center stage in Cheaney's latest tale of suspense (after The Playmaker). Since he first began his apprenticeship to the theater company known as Lord Hunsdon's Men, Richard Malory has had a combative relationship with haughty Kit Glover, widely known as the best boy player in London. Things only get thornier when Richard takes it upon himself to protect the company's newest apprentice, an enigmatic Welsh boy, and it appears that at least one of Richard's fellow actors is in cahoots with an outlaw, dubbed "the New Robin Hood" (popularized in ballads for tricking and robbing the political rivals of the Duke of Essex). Meanwhile, Master William Shakespeare, the company's playwright, has developed one of his most popular works yet: a pair of plays based on the life of King Henry IV. The author interweaves fascinating historical tidbits throughout (how actors used lead spoons as part of their make-up routine; every Englishman of the time was required to be a competent enough archer to defend his country in case of invasion; etc.). Despite some instances of heavy-handed plotting (the parallel drawn between troubled Kit's moral growth and Prince Hal's maturation seems forced, and the Robin Hood mystery is so convoluted that even one of the novel's characters describes it as "the sort of stagy plan a playmaker would devise"), only the dourest reader would pass up this breathless scramble of 16th-century London. Ages 10-up. (Oct.)
