Semi-retired folk-rock musician Ian Scarborough is now a music critic with a London newspaper who has become interested in the Shakespeare authorship question and is an advocate for the Seventeenth Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere, as the true author. He becomes involved in tracking miscreants who may have found artifacts or documents proving one or the other as author. His journey takes him to some of the important historical sites in England as well as a mysterious conference during a Sherlock Holmes club weekend in an upstate New York hotel, then across parts of Europe and back to London in his quest for the truth. Conflicted by who to trust and where the odyssey will take him, he pursues the truth arduously.