Shardlake must hold his tongue and forge onwards as best he can, hoping that he is one step ahead of his critics throughout. Sansom’s story is set mostly in York, as Shardlake and his assistant Jack Barak (played as a believable duo by Fergus Rattigan and Sam Thorpe-Spinks, the only two professional actors) undertake work for Henry VIII’s Progress to the North. Arriving in York, Shardlake senses that things may not be as troubling as Cranmer posited, seeing a community ready to celebrate with their King. When the formula is however stolen and two lifeless bodies are discovered, Shardlake suddenly finds himself with two chellenging cases and little time on his hands to solve them.

The victim appears to have fallen from a ladder, but there is surely more to it, which is substantiated when Shardlake discovers a box of documents. However, events are quickly complicated when the murder of a York glazier leads Shardlake to the discovery of important documents that bring the king's right to the throne into question. His previous novels include Dissolution and Dark Fire, both Matthew Shardlake mysteries, and Winter in Madrid, a thriller set around the Spanish Civil War.Sansom's handling on the historical background, in this case Henry VIII's marriage to Catherine Howard. The pace is slow and I am sure some who reviewed this book were bored with all the wandering around town. One of Shardlake’s tasks is to assure that a prisoner is not abused before he can be brought back to the Tower of London and interrogated by the King’s experts.

it is a vision of how individuals find the moral courage to fight injustice which links the Shardlake novels to Sansom's other fictions, Winter in Madrid and Dominion. It was largely a conflict between Christian factions; thankfully, most play relatively little role today in England. One thing all my books have in common is the struggle between reason and compassion (personified by Shardlake) and the competing religious fundamentalisms of his day—by which I mean doctrines that put versions of faith first while putting people and human values a poor second, and believe that doing such is what God intends.Over the course of three Shardlake books, he's solidified in my mind as a rather vile and detestable man; the power he had was quite absurd and wildly misused.

But the murder of a York glazier involves Shardlake in deeper mysteries, connected not only to the prisoner in York Castle but to the royal family itself. A. Lawyers seem to have been viewed as greedy parasites on people’s misfortunes throughout the ages, and they certainly were in Tudor times, when litigation was growing. In addition, the lawyer and his assistant Jack Barak are witnesses to a crime and they discover a cache of secret documents which could threaten the Tudor throne. The king, fearing another uprising, made the arduous trip to win over these unfaithful and demand homage from those who had not done enough to discourage the rebellion.

Sunday Times Culture - Your 100 Best Holiday Reads Sansom’s evocation of 16th century London amidst the turmoil of the Reformation is compelling.

As heretics are hunted across London, and the radical Protestant Anne Askew is burned at the stake, the Catholic party focus their attack on Henry's sixth wife, Matthew Shardlake's old mentor, Queen Catherine Parr.Shardlake works on commission initially from Thomas Cromwell in Dissolution and Dark Fire and then Thomas Cranmer in Sovereign and Revelation. The downside is that all those elements combined result in a voluminous book that became a bit boring at times.