Harvard Yard

I first heard of William Martin's Harvard Yard on a recommendation from my girlfriend, who described it as a bit historical fiction with a modern mystery mixed in taking place around Cambridge, Massachusetts. I'm a sucker for books that take place around here so I recently gave this one a shot. Harvard Yard is the second in Martin's 'Peter Fallon' series, so I went in under the assumption that this was going to be some sort of Dan Brown style thriller where I would learn the 'secrets' behind the history of Harvard while unraveling some centuries old mystery. That's not too far off from what I got, but Martin definitely has his own distinct style. Chapters alternate between book dealer Peter Fallon's hunt for a lost Shakespeare play, Love's Labours Won all across New England, and a generation by generation recap of what the play went through over the past four centuries. It turns out Shakespeare was good friends with Robert Harvard, father of John, and after being passed down through two generations of Harvards, the play is entrusted to family friends, the Wedge family. At this point Martin literally details twelve generations of Wedges and how their quest to protect the play intersected with not only Harvard history, but important events in American and world history. And to tell the truth, Martin did a pretty great job of it. I've never really read any historical fiction but I found that the dozens of members of the Wedge family were all fleshed out pretty well and I was pretty excited reading about them. The Peter Fallon side wasn't quite so good- it got pretty convoluted and I think really would have benefited from being a more subdued hunt than a life-threatening chase. Still though, I'll probably read and post the first book in the series, Back Bay, at some point and see how it stacks up.