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.