All is dissolving.ĭissolution is the first in a series of books featuring Shardlake. The Bible says God made man in his image but I think we make and remake him in whatever happens to suit our shifting needs. there is nowhere safe in the world now, nothing certain. By the time the book ends, his faith in humanity is damaged and his idealism has given way to an acute awareness of the corruption all around him.

What he discovers creates deep unease within himself about Cromwell’s motives and challenges his beliefs about the new future for his country once Reform is fully enacted. The heavy snow which falls as Shardlake arrives at the monastery acts as a metaphoric cloak through which he must penetrate to find the killer.īut Shardlake uncovers more than the answer to the crime. Sansom perfectly evokes the desolation and isolation of the monastery’s setting on the edge of the Weald with its treacherous currents that only smugglers and a few inhabitants dare cross. What lifts Dissolution well above the usual fare is the quality of Sansom’s writing with its strong sense of place and atmosphere and an intriguing, multi-dimensional protagonist.

Hidden passages false trails multiple corpses near death experiences fights and escapes: all the standard components of the genre are in this book.

His choice - Matthew Shardlake, lawyer and long-time supporter of the Reformation. Shardlake and his young relative Mark Poer are despatched to the south coast to investigate the murder.Īs in all good murder mystery stories, the investigators quickly learn almost everyone has a secret and a motive. He needs the perpetrator found quickly and secretly - and he knows just the man to do the job. The murder of a Royal Commissioner while on a mission to root out corruption at a monastery in Kent, threatens to disrupt all of Cromwell’s plans.

Those who resist and speak out against the new order find themselves imprisoned in the Tower of London and tortured or executed. Chief Minister Thomas Cromwell is hell bent on ensuring Catholicism is eradicated dissolving the monasteries, evicting its cloistered inhabitants and selling the land and assets to loyal supporters of his master King Henry VIII. Dissolution plunges us into the turmoil of a sixteenth-century England whose citizens fear for their lives unless they adhere to the country’s newly proscribed form of faith.

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