Review Roundup: Griffiths, Law, Lipska, Sansom, Wanner, Watson

Here are six reviews which have been added to the Euro Crime website today, all have appeared on the blog since last time*.

*I am trialling a new approach for the next few weeks in that all reviews will appear on the blog rather than being separate under the Euro Crime website. I feel this will give the reviews more exposure and make them more findable in a search engine. The reviews will appear daily ie Monday to Friday, with roundups on Sundays. This week has been British authors, next week will be Translated authors, the week after that Scottish authors and the week after that, is again Translated authors.

I'd be interested in any comments about this new approach. I think I'm the only one that worries about the distinction between blog and website! The blog is free and I currently pay to have the website. As it stands, if Euro Crime were to cease then the website would disappear after a couple of years but the blog might  remain indefinitely.

You can keep up to date with Euro Crime by following the blog and/or liking the Euro Crime Facebook page and follow on Twitter, @eurocrime.

New Reviews

Michelle Peckham reviews Elly Griffiths's The Zig Zag Girl, the first in a new series set in post-war Brighton;


Ewa Sherman reviews J S Law's debut Tenacity set in a submarine;

Rich Westwood reviews Anya Lipska's A Devil Under the Skin, which is the third in the Kizska and Kershaw series;


Susan White reviews Lamentation by C J Sansom;

Amanda Gillies reviews Len Wanner's Tartan Noir: the Definitive Guide to Scottish Crime Fiction


and Michelle also reviews S J Watson's Second Life.

Forthcoming titles can be found by author or date or by category, along with releases by year.

Review: Lamentation by C J Sansom

Lamentation by C J Sansom, May 2015, 650 pages, Mantle, ISBN: 0230744206

Reviewed by Susan White.
(Read more of Susan's reviews for Euro Crime here.)

Henry VIII of England is coming to the end of his life, struggling with his weight and health and trying to leave a country that is secure for his only son and heir, eight-year-old Edward. It is a time of religious tension with many factions from reformers to traditionalists vying for his support and attention and also the chance to control the government under young Edward in due course.

Henry's sixth wife, Catherine Parr has written a book - Lamentations of a Sinner - concerning her personal thoughts about faith, which, she believes, is more involved with the study of the Bible rather than the ceremony of the Church. This belief was highly controversial and on advice from Archbishop Cranmer, she decides that the book must be destroyed as her thoughts could be construed as treason - especially by the King. However the book has disappeared and she turns to her old protegy, Matthew Shardlake, now Serjeant at the Court of Common Pleas, in the urgent and dangerous - but very secret mission - to find the book and return it to her.

As Shardlake follows the meagre clues, with his trusted colleague Jack Barak. they are taken into the hidden world of people whose thoughts are so radical that, if found, they would be burnt at the stake for heresy. He also has to tread the dangerous path of palace politics, a world he thought he had left far behind.

The politics of religion and religious freedom made living in the time of Henry VIII very frightening for both noble and commoner with the structures of faith and worship seeming to change almost daily. The author obviously knows the history of this time inside and out and is able to portray the excitement, the politics, the danger and the confusion of it very vividly. LAMENTATION is a must for readers of quality historical fiction.

This is the sixth in the series featuring Matthew Shardlake

Susan White, July 2015

The New C J Sansom book - Lamentation

C J Sansom's sixth book in the Matthew Shardlake series, Lamentation, is published 23 October 2014. It's been a four year wait since Heartstone.

And now the cover and the blurb have been revealed:

Summer, 1546.

King Henry VIII is slowly, painfully dying. His Protestant and Catholic councillors are engaged in a final and decisive power struggle; whoever wins will control the government of Henry’s successor, eight-year-old Prince Edward. 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, still haunted by events aboard the warship Mary Rose the year before, is working on the Cotterstoke Will case, a savage dispute between rival siblings. Then, unexpectedly, he is summoned to Whitehall Palace and asked for help by his old patron, the now beleaguered and desperate Queen.

For Catherine Parr has a secret. She has written a confessional book, Lamentation of a Sinner, so radically Protestant that if it came to the King’s attention it could bring both her and her sympathizers crashing down. But, although the book was kept secret and hidden inside a locked chest in the Queen’s private chamber, it has – inexplicably – vanished. Only one page has been found, clutched in the hand of a murdered London printer.

Shardlake’s investigations take him on a trail that begins among the backstreet printshops of London but leads him and Jack Barak into the dark and labyrinthine world of the politics of the royal court; a world he had sworn never to enter again. Loyalty to the Queen will drive him into a swirl of intrigue inside Whitehall Palace, where Catholic enemies and Protestant friends can be equally dangerous, and the political opportunists, who will follow the wind wherever it blows, more dangerous than either. 

The theft of Queen Catherine’s book proves to be connected to the terrible death of Anne Askew, while his involvement with the Cotterstoke litigants threatens to bring Shardlake himself to the stake.

Watch the promo video on YouTube.

New Reviews: Armstrong, Cato, Charters, Sansom, Varesi, Wagner

One competition for September and it is open internationally closes 30st:
Win one of three copies of From the Dead by Mark Billingham (Worldwide)

Here are this week's reviews:

Starting off this week with a rare excursion into true-crime: Amanda Gillies reviews A Matter of Life and Death by Sue Armstrong (subtitled: inside the hidden world of the pathologist);

Laura Root reviews a cozy set in Devon: Birthdays Can Be Murder by Joyce Cato;

Terry Halligan reviews the debut from Charlie Charters - Bolt Action which he loved;

Similarly, Pat Austin didn't want C J Sansom's latest Shardlake, Heartstone to end;

Maxine Clarke reviews a new to English, Italian author: Valerio Varesi's River of Shadows, tr. Joseph Farrell

and I review Jan Costin Wagner's long awaited sequel to Ice Moon: Silence, tr. Anthea Bell.

Previous reviews can be found in the review archive and forthcoming titles can be found by author or date, here.

Tudor Crime

Tudor era crime fiction seems to be quite popular at the moment. The latest in C J Sansom's Shardlake series, Heartstone, will be out in September:

It was summer, 1545. England is at war. Henry VIII's invasion of France has gone badly wrong, and a massive French fleet is preparing to sail across the Channel. As the English fleet gathers at Portsmouth, the country raises the largest militia army it has ever seen. The King has debased the currency to pay for the war, and England is in the grip of soaring inflation and economic crisis. Meanwhile Matthew Shardlake is given an intriguing legal case by an old servant of Queen Catherine Parr. Asked to investigate claims of 'monstrous wrongs' committed against a young ward of the court, which have already involved one mysterious death, Shardlake and his assistant Barak journey to Portsmouth. Once arrived, Shardlake and Barak find themselves in a city preparing to become a war zone; and Shardlake takes the opportunity to also investigate the mysterious past of Ellen Fettipace, a young woman incarcerated in the Bedlam. The emerging mysteries around the young ward, and the events that destroyed Ellen's family nineteen years before, involve Shardlake in reunions both with an old friend and an old enemy close to the throne. Events will converge on board one of the King's great warships, primed for battle in Portsmouth harbour.

In the meantime, S J Parris's Heresy has just been published:

Introducing the monk Giodarno Bruno, magician, scientist, and heretic in a new series of historical thrillers for fans of C.J.Sansom and 'The Name of the Rose' England, 1583 A country awash with paranoia and conspiracy -- but a safe haven for a radical monk on the run. Giordano Bruno, with his theories of astronomy and extraterrestrial life, has fled the Inquisition for the court of Elizabeth I. Here, he attracts the attention of Francis Walsingham, chief spymaster and sworn enemy of Catholic plotters. Bruno is sent undercover to Oxford, where the university is believed to be a hotbed of French dissent. Bruno quickly finds himself drawn into college intrigues, and distracted by a beautiful young woman. Before long, he is investigating a hideous series of murders, each linked by a letter offering clues. The letters suggest that each victim was guilty of heresy. But is Bruno being aided or misled - or is he himself the next target? Stalking a cunning and determined killer through the shadowy cloisters of Oxford, Bruno realizes that even the wise cannot always tell truth from heresy. But some are prepared to kill for it!

On the 1st April, the first in a new series - Bones of Avalon - from Phil Rickman will be published:

Religious strife, Glastonbury legends, the bones of King Arthur and the curse of the Tudors...can Renaissance man John Dee help the young Queen Elizabeth to avoid it? It is 1560. Elizabeth Tudor has been on the throne for a year, the date for her coronation having been chosen by her astrologer, Dr John Dee, at just 32 already famous throughout Europe as a mathematician and expert in the hidden arts. But neither Elizabeth nor Dee feel entirely secure. Both have known imprisonment for political reasons. The Queen is unpopular with both Roman Catholics and the new breed of puritanical protestant. Dee is regarded with suspicion in an era where the dividing line between science and sorcery is, at best, indistinct. And the assignment he's been given by the Queen's chief minister, Sir William Cecil, will blur it further: ride to the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey, bring back King Arthur's bones. The mission takes the mild, bookish Dee to the tangled roots of English magic and the Arthurian legacy so important to the Tudors. Into unexpected violence, spiritual darkness, the breathless stirring of first love...and the cold heart of a complex plot against Elizabeth. With him is his friend and former student, Robert Dudley, a risk-taker, a wild card...and possibly the Queen's secret lover. Dee is Elizabethan England's forgotten hero. A man for whom this world - even the rapidly-expanding world of the Renaissance - was never enough.

On the 29th April, Revenger, the sequel to Martyr by Rory Clements will be out:

1592. England and Spain are at war, yet there is peril at home, too. The death of her trusted spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham has left Queen Elizabeth vulnerable. Conspiracies multiply. The quiet life of John Shakespeare is shattered by a summons from Robert Cecil, the cold but deadly young statesman who dominated the last years of the Queen's long reign, insisting Shakespeare re-enter government service. His mission: to find vital papers, now in the possession of the Earl of Essex. Essex is the brightest star in the firmament, a man of ambition. He woos the Queen, thirty-three years his senior, as if she were a girl his age. She is flattered by him -- despite her loathing for his mother, the beautiful, dangerous Lettice Knollys who presides over her own glittering court -- a dazzling array of the mad, bad, dangerous and disaffected. When John Shakespeare infiltrates this dissolute world he discovers not only that the Queen herself is in danger -- but that he and his family is also a target. With only his loyal footsoldier Boltfoot Cooper at his side, Shakespeare must face implacable forces who believe themselves above the law: men and women who kill without compunction. And in a world of shifting allegiances, just how far he can trust Robert Cecil, his devious new master?

Available on import (to the UK) we have the first in a new series from Peg Herring, Her Highness' First Murder which came out in January:

Elizabeth Tudor is as appalled as everyone else when headless corpses litter the streets of London, but when one of her own ladies is murdered, she vows to stop the killer. Her new friend Simon Maldon wants to help, and they join with a sergeant of the King’s Welsh Guard to investigate. Is the killer Elizabeth’s castellan? A creepy cleric who manages her household accounts? A madman captured on the grounds?

Religion seems to be a factor, since the murdered women are dressed in nun’s robes. Is it due to the fact that Henry’s beheaded two wives or that he’s outlawed Catholicism in England? The answers aren’t clear, but danger soon stalks the two young people. As the guardsmen search frantically for the depraved killer, Simon finds himself a prisoner, alone and in trouble. Elizabeth’s life is threatened as well. It may be too late for one of them, maybe both, to emerge from Her Highness’ first murder alive.

Queen Elizabeth I also appears in a seven book series by Karen Harper.

Ken to play Shardlake

I missed this in the Observer a few weeks ago. Apparently the BBC are in talks to film C J Sansom's Tudor series with Kenneth Branagh as the main character:

Branagh, 46, plans to take the role of a hunchback lawyer named Shardlake who works for the key power brokers of the Tudor court, Thomas Cromwell and Thomas Cranmer. Negotiations to bring Shardlake, the idiosyncratic character at the centre of a series of mystery novels by CJ Sansom, to the small screen are believed to be in their final stages.

Read the Euro Crime review of the latest in the series, Sovereign.