C. J. Sansom’s Shardlake series concerns the activities of a hunchback lawyer struggling to make a living in the increasingly dangerous setting of Henry VIII’s reign. The first three novels have been deservedly successful, not least because of Matthew Shardlake himself, a man of intelligence and integrity who has managed to survive with his essential decency intact. He had a particularly harrowing time in the previous book in the series, Sovereign, when he narrowly averted a rebellion, survived torture in the Tower and was publicly humiliated by the bloated and paranoid tyrant on the throne of England.
Now, 18 months later, things are about to get even worse. It’s 1543, and the King, having disposed of his previous wife, is sizing up the recently widowed Catherine Parr for his sixth queen. Archbishop Cranmer and other leading Protestants are broadly in favour, since she is known to support their Reformist ideas but adherents to the old religion are still numerous, and they have other views.
Shardlake, a serjeant at the Court of Requests, is in the Cranmer camp, though his own religious beliefs are looking distinctly threadbare. On Easter morning he is horrified to find the mutilated corpse of his friend and colleague, Roger Elliard, lying in a fountain of his own blood in Lincoln’s Inn. His widow, Dorothy, for whom Shardlake himself has carried a candle for 20 years, reveals that the previous evening he was lured away to a meeting with an unknown client. Shardlake’s doctor, Guy Malton, discloses that Elliard was drugged with an unusual opiated compound before his throat was cut.
As soon as the inquest is convened, Shardlake realises that the Crown is taking an ominous interest in this murder.
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