Sovereign (The Shardlake series, 3)

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I love the Matthew Shardlake series, but I find I have to come up for air before diving into the next book. Shardlake works on commission initially from Thomas Cromwell in Dissolution and Dark Fire and then Thomas Cranmer in Sovereign and Revelation. You feel like the books are true escapism and that you can visualize the world that the author has created using a combination of facts and fictional ideas. But the murder of a York glazier involves Shardlake in deeper mysteries, connected not only to the prisoner in York Castle but to the royal family itself. After Shardlake’s protector, Cromwell, is killed, life seems to resume its usual pace for the lawyer.

Master Shardlake, an attorney, is sent ahead to York to assist with processing petitions to the King.Sansom is the bestselling author of the acclaimed Shardlake series, the Spanish Civil War thriller Winter in Madrid and the number one bestseller Dominion. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.

I think it would expand the world for the readers and give them a taste of other royal dynasties and what else was going on in the world during the time of the Tudor dynasty in England. By insisting God intended her to be married to the King until death, she brought about the very revolution to religion she hated and feared. With such a remarkable cast of characters, Sansom had to put them through extremely difficult obstacles to test their limits and to give his readers a breathtaking look into the Tudor world. Soon Shardlake is sucked into a plot involving politics, the murky past of the Royal line, and the future of the Realm.The Great Progression occurred in 1541; King Henry, his court, servants, and a thousand soldiers left London for the northern city of York, a total of over 3,000 people. His faith has been shaken to the point where he’s not sure if he still believes in God at all, and he, like most of his countrymen, now sees Henry as a tyrant to be feared rather than a monarch to be loved. Accompanied by a thousand soldiers, the cream of the nobility, and his fifth wife Catherine Howard, the King is to attend an extravagant submission of the local gentry at York. Apparently the king’s Progress is not a very famous fact from history and it was interesting to learn more about it. Elizabeth Tudor, the intellectual daughter of the king who has a similar temper to that of her father, but has a longing to help the Boleyn family in honor of her mother.

Having read and thoroughly enjoyed the tightly written first two books of this series, I found myself, in the build-up part of the book - the first half, extremely puzzled by the seemingly slow nature of the story-telling and of the plot development.I know modern York well and quite a bit about its history, but the story really brings the sixteenth century city to life.