nwhyte 's review for:

Revelation by C.J. Sansom

3.0

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http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2288072.html[return][return]Revelation is set in the last years of the reign of Henry VIII, and involves an established character, lawyer Matthew Shardlake, pursuing a serial killer who is repeating the opening of the seals in the Book of Revelation. I quite enjoyed the mystery and some of the chrome (the henchman's unhappy marriage, the African doctor) but thought that Sansom laid it on a bit thick in invoking Copernicus and other contemporary thinkers (De revolutionibus orbium cSlestium as a topic of conversation in London in its year of publication? Hardly!) and also overestimates the power of the Tudor police state in successfully covering up gruesome murders, particularly the ones it wasn't actually responsible for. Hilary Mantel catches the idiom of the period much more convincingly in Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies. But it is entertaining enough.