Dan Simmons

In the distant future, a wandering acting troupe performs the plays of Shakespeare for a series of increasingly important alien species, with evidence that the fate of all humanity may rest on the quality of their work.

A series of high-speed fatal car wrecks -- accidents that seem. as if they may have been staged -- is leading Darwin Minor down a dangerous road. A reluctantexpert on violent ways to die, he sifts clues from wreckage the way a brilliant coroner extracts damning information from a victim's corpse. But the deeper …