Anyone who’s read my reviews knows how much I love reading about the Plantagenets and the Wars of the Roses in general. So when I got to book three in the Shardlake series, I had high hopes for it and it surely did not disappoint.
But I have to start with something that nags: I’m not a fan of Shardlake himself. True he cannot help his physical condition and the way people treat him is terrible. But the way he treats everyone else is…also not great. He’s at his best when he’s researching and detecting and he fends off the taunts well enough but in most interactions, it’s like if Jon Snow was playing Sam Tarly’s role. He’s just not a great hang and if these books weren’t so good otherwise, I wouldn’t bother.
But they are so good! I love the rich history CJ Sansom suffuses them in: I could feel the anti-monarchical tension in the north as if it were real and it added to the intensity of the tale. Like if Game of Thrones was a detective story.
And it was fun to read Sansom unpack the history of the Plantagenets, the complicated (at best) ancestry of Henry VIII and touch on the real, legit issues as to why he should have sat on the throne. Justice for Richard III, although a DNA test proved that maybe he was the illegitimate one and not his brother.
Also, while there’s a bevy of works that try to glamorize the court of Henry VIII, Sansom does a great job of pegging it for what it was: a scandalous court run by a scoundrel.
This was my favorite of the series by far and I can’t wait until the next one, in which he tackles Revelation.