Dissolution

Dissolution by C.J. Sansom
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The year is 1537, the tyrant Henry VIII is on the throne, his much-anticipated religious reform is souring by the minute, and now that the smaller monasteries have been dissolved it is time for the larger ones, who together own great swathes of English countryside, to capitulate. When one of Thomas Cromwell’s commissioners is decapitated whilst persuading one such community to do so “voluntarily”, the Vicar General sends the hunchback lawyer Matthew Shardlake to investigate.
Historical whodunnits really don’t get any better than this, not least because you don’t need any foreknowledge of the period to appreciate it; Sansom lays before you all you need to know against a background of beheadings, tortured confessions, and even talking parrots imported in appalling conditions to amuse London’s elite.
He also paints a fine picture of a religion in turmoil, with the papist monks who believe they need to intercede between God and the common folk in order to ease their paths out of purgatory, the reformers who to varying degrees believe that intercession is neither necessary nor desirable (for there is no such thing as purgatory), the individual hot-gospellers who have access to an English bible for the very first time and, gorging on the words, believe themselves to be God’s own prophets, and the king and his cronies who cynically use reformation to feather their own pockets. Then, of course, there are the common folk themselves who quite rightly suspect that they will be no better off when all this reformation nonsense is done and dusted.
But that’s just my own humble opinion…what do you think? Do let me know!

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