Tombland is not to be treated lightly. Its length hints at its ambitions. Here is a Tudor epic disguised as a historical crime novel.
C.J. Sansom’s ‘Shardlake’ series, of which this is the seventh episode, deals with the activities of a hunchbacked lawyer in the 1530s and 1540s. The bloated old king is now dead, and his son, Edward VI, a minor, rules through the Lord Protector, his uncle Somerset. England is in a parlous state — verging on bankruptcy after a disastrous Scottish war, uneasy with the new regime’s ultra-Protestant policies and on the brink of civil unrest.
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Shardlake has somehow managed to cling to his integrity, despite having some dangerously high-profile clients. Among the latter is the Lady Elizabeth, the 15-year-old daughter of Henry VIII’s disgraced queen Anne Boleyn. Elizabeth despatches Shardlake to Norwich, England’s second wealthiest city, to monitor the trial for murder of a distant cousin of her mother’s.
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