Revelation
By C. J. Sansom
The fourth book in the series sees Shardlake far removed from politics, following his request to Archbishop Cranmer at the end of the previous book, Sovereign.
The year is 1543. Henry VIII’s tyrannical reign is in a state of flux. He’s now giving up on his new religion and is reverting to Catholic traditions, minus the bit about the Pope being the head.
The streets are an unsettling place, as people no longer know what to believe. Two whales wash up in the Thames, yet another sign from above that the world is going to end.
Shardlake, once a reformer, has seen enough over the years to make him agnostic. Would that everyone else could be like that. Unfortunately, such is not the case, especially as one villain, who has taken it upon himself to murder people who have lost their convictions in gruesome ways which mirror the prophecies in the book of Revelations. The final target may even be Catherine Parr, recently widowed, and desired by the king.
I didn’t like this book as much as the previous ones and it took a fair bit of reading to feel that I was making progress at all. Toward the end, though, things pick up, and all the little asides head somewhere. I was determined to leave the final chapters to a following evening so that I could blog about the book with it fresh in mind, but I found myself drawn into the “just one more chapter” mentality, a sign of good writing, and the last sixty pages fell in short order.
It’s one of the nicer-looking books that I can think of, if not actually sitting atop the summit. I just suck at reviews, so I think I’ll paste this one from The Observer’s Stephanie Merritt, who writes about it much more entertainingly and eloquently than I could. I read, not write 
Violent clashes of radical religious groups; tax increases to fund foreign wars; whales washed up in the Thames; scandalous public care of the mentally ill; even references to a man killing prostitutes in East Anglia. No, not a round-up of recent headlines, but some of the plot strands in Revelation, the fourth in CJ Sansom’s superb Tudor detective series. The past is not so foreign after all.
The year is 1543 and the hunchbacked lawyer and sometime detective Matthew Shardlake has sworn not to involve himself in any more affairs of state after his last brush with the factions of King Henry’s court in Sovereign (2007). But his quiet working life is shattered when his old friend Roger Elliard, a fellow lawyer, is found with his throat cut in Lincoln’s Inn fountain. When the king’s coroner seems to be covering up the murder, Shardlake promises Elliard’s widow that he will find the killer, a mission he shares with Archbishop Cranmer, who must keep the investigation a secret from the king. If it fails, they could all lose their heads.
What Shardlake begins to uncover is more horrifying than anything he and his hot-blooded young assistant Jack Barak have yet had to face. There have been multiple killings in previous books, but this is the first time Shardlake has found himself on the trail of a serial killer in the modern mould, one who treats killing as both a holy mission and an art form, and takes as much pleasure in teasing his pursuers as in the murders themselves.
It would not be giving too much away to say that the killer is basing his murders on the prophecies of the Book of Revelation, whose apocalyptic visions have recently been opened to the common people through the king’s reforms. I suspect a homage to David Fincher’s 1995 film Se7en - the murders are every bit as imaginatively gruesome and symbolic. As with the previous books, Sansom’s narrative is highly visual and Revelation will clearly make a white-knuckle film (a BBC series is reportedly in development starring Kenneth Branagh).
Shardlake has been dubbed ‘the Tudor Morse’; like Morse, he is solitary, cerebral, occasionally flawed and driven by a belief in an ideal of justice that stands above the petty rivalries of his profession. He has the same fierce moral core, but he also has a warmth that Morse lacked, which leaves the reader feeling torn whenever a potential love interest appears; you’d like it to work out for him, but he just wouldn’t be Shardlake if he ended up in cosy domestic bliss.
The other great appeal of these books, apart from the cast of regular characters, is the richness of Sansom’s historical research. He has a doctorate in history and a previous career as a lawyer, but wears his considerable expertise lightly. He also achieves the rare alchemy of combining characters who are sympathetically modern in their psychology with a setting that is authentically historical. He leads us through 16th-century London as confidently as if he lived there himself and even without the helpful endpaper maps, the reader can immediately visualise the muddy streets, the marshes along the South Bank and the ancient City walls.
Revelation takes a little time to get its main plot rolling but it is very skilfully structured - not an incident is wasted - and once the killer’s intentions become clear, don’t expect to put the book down until you’ve seen it through to the apocalyptic finale.
Tags: C. J. Sansom, Shardlake