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4.23 AVERAGE
4.23 AVERAGE
This is the fourth book in Sansom's series, featuring Tudor lawyer and detective Matthew Shardlake, and it's all good. I've really enjoyed all the books in this series and 'Revelation' was no exception to that...
In this volume, Shardlake is settling down to a new job as a barrister in the Court of Requests - a job that suits his egalitarian nature quite well, as it often means representing the poor and oppressed against more powerful adversaries. Among the cases he has picked up is that of Adam Kite, a young man who is risking a nasty death as a heretic because of his compulsive behaviour, which is religious in nature.
Alongside this, when one of Shardlake's friends is found gruesomely murdered, he's unwittingly drawn into a hunt for a serial killer - in a time where having the wrong religious views can literally be fatal, how dangerous is a killer who believes he is re-enacting scenes from the Book of Revelation? There's trouble in the domestic arena too, as Shardlake's friend and employee Jack Barak's marriage is crumbling under the strain of the hunt for the serial killer and other stressors.
In this volume, Shardlake is settling down to a new job as a barrister in the Court of Requests - a job that suits his egalitarian nature quite well, as it often means representing the poor and oppressed against more powerful adversaries. Among the cases he has picked up is that of Adam Kite, a young man who is risking a nasty death as a heretic because of his compulsive behaviour, which is religious in nature.
Alongside this, when one of Shardlake's friends is found gruesomely murdered, he's unwittingly drawn into a hunt for a serial killer - in a time where having the wrong religious views can literally be fatal, how dangerous is a killer who believes he is re-enacting scenes from the Book of Revelation? There's trouble in the domestic arena too, as Shardlake's friend and employee Jack Barak's marriage is crumbling under the strain of the hunt for the serial killer and other stressors.
This Shardlake centres on religious mania, apocalyptic expectations, and the affect on people of new interpretations of sin from radical Protestants. It’s a picture of ‘culture wars’ with a real sense of society unravelling. If he’d written it this year, and not ten years ago, I’d accuse him of being topical: I felt the reverberations, and to me that means he lifts this into a novel you might find of relevance whenever you live.
His cast: Matthew Shardlake, lawyer, who gets jeered at as ‘crookback’ on the street; his doctor friend of Spanish Muslim family past, now Catholic (who gets called ‘the old Moor’ etc.); Jack Barak his lower class employee/friend of Jewish background. Even when Barak, in this one, is being abysmal at the job of new husband, these are an interesting, realistic, likeable lot and I was reading for the characters as much as anything.
This series is justly famous for its depiction of place, its realism of setting (3rd time I’ve used ‘real’). I found it just right, not too much detail nor too litte, and smoothly written.
His cast: Matthew Shardlake, lawyer, who gets jeered at as ‘crookback’ on the street; his doctor friend of Spanish Muslim family past, now Catholic (who gets called ‘the old Moor’ etc.); Jack Barak his lower class employee/friend of Jewish background. Even when Barak, in this one, is being abysmal at the job of new husband, these are an interesting, realistic, likeable lot and I was reading for the characters as much as anything.
This series is justly famous for its depiction of place, its realism of setting (3rd time I’ve used ‘real’). I found it just right, not too much detail nor too litte, and smoothly written.