The first Shardlake novel, Dissolution, was set in a monastery, and the next, Dark Fire, took us into the heart of Tudor London Sansom did a wonderful job of bringing those settings to life and he does the same here with York, capturing the mood of the people in the aftermath of a failed rebellion – people whose political and religious beliefs are not necessarily in alignment with the king’s. To make matters worse, he and Barak stumble upon a liaison between the king’s wife, Catherine Howard, and one of her courtiers, Thomas Culpeper it seems that danger is closing in on them from all sides. Shardlake barely has time to look at the documents before they are stolen again, but the little bit of knowledge he has gained puts his own life at risk. Shortly after arriving in York, the murder of a glazier leaves Shardlake in possession of a chest of documents which, if they fall into the wrong hands, could be used to destroy the king.
An important prisoner, Sir Edward Broderick, is due to be brought from York to London, and Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, has asked Shardlake to take responsibility for Broderick’s welfare as he doesn’t want the prisoner to die before he can be questioned in the Tower. Officially, Shardlake will be dealing with petitions to the king made by the people of York, but he has also been given another task to carry out. The royal progress is heading for York – and so are lawyer Matthew Shardlake and his assistant, Jack Barak. The novel opens in 1541, as Henry VIII embarks on his Progress to the North, a state visit with the aim of allowing those who rebelled during the recent Pilgrimage of Grace to make their formal apologies to the king.
Well, I wouldn’t go quite that far, but it was certainly a gripping story and while I’m not sure that it really needed to be over 600 pages long, I never found myself getting bored. The front cover states that it is “So compulsive that, until you reach its final page, you’ll have to be almost physically prised away from it”. Sovereign is the third in CJ Sansom’s Shardlake mystery series set in Tudor England and I found it every bit as good as the first two.
0 kommentar(er)
