This review was written by and read live live on the bookshow by Brian Lowen on 5th Feb 2015
I have read one of
this author’s previous books, also set in the Tudor period.
This was called
Sovereign and it concerned Henry VIII’s Progress (as it was called) up to the
city of York to quell the ill feeling amongst his northern subjects. It was
amazing the organisation needed to get the whole court plus soldiers up to York
before the days of high speed transport.
The hero of this
story is also Matthew Shardlake, a sergeant lawyer working in his own chambers
in Lincolns’ Inn in London in the mid fifteen hundreds. He is a semi invalid
with a bent back which does cause him pain if he has to stand for too long.
This story is set
at the end of Henry’s reign when he is a poor old thing, grossly fat with legs
full of blisters and hardly able to walk. Not at all like the Henry we see in
Wolf Hall on the TV which of course is set much earlier in his reign. By the
time of this story Thomas Cromwell has been beheaded.
the city, when if
convicted, they were burnt at the stake. The book which is still in manuscript
form was called Lamentations of a Sinner.
She has not told
Henry that this book has gone missing, fearing he would fly into a temper, so
asks Shardlake to carry out secret investigations to try and find it for her.
They concoct a story that a valuable jewel has been stolen to hide the real
reason for the search.
And so the whole
story is involved with the search for the book and the
many scrapes that Shardlake and his assistants get into while searching for it.
We learn a lot
about what it was like to live in that period in London and the devious way
politics worked in the Royal Court, which is all very interesting and good maps
are provided inside the covers of the book, which is over 600 pages long.
I enjoyed the
book, although I felt it could have been a bit shorter as some of the
investigations tend to be a bit wearisome.
No comments:
Post a Comment