THREE MORE TUDOR-ERA MYSTERIES

Dissolution CJ Sansom (2003)

Matthew Shardlake made his first appearance in this gripping and well-written novel. The year is 1537 and the lawyer is despatched to a soon-to-be dissolved monastery to look into the brutal killing of one of Thomas Cromwell’s men. At the same time, a sacrilegious ritual appears to have taken place in the monastery. As he investigates, and more murders take place, Shardlake is forced to question everything he believes and holds most dear.

Firedrake’s Eye Patricia Finney (1992)

In 1583, Elizabeth I becomes the target of a Catholic assassination plot hoping to restore the old faith to England. Simon Ames and David Becket, two agents for Elizabeth’s spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham, work to save the queen and unmask the plotters. As they venture into the dangerous underworld of Tudor London, Finney’s vivid use of language and her gift for lively characterisation produce a book of great originality and energy.

Heresy SJ Parris (2010)

Parris has taken the real-life figure of the freethinking Italian polymath and philosopher Giordano Bruno, who spent some years in Elizabethan England, and turned him into the hero of a series of entertaining historical thrillers. In the first of them, Bruno is soon in danger when he is sent to Oxford to investigate a conspiracy against the queen and is confronted by a series of brutal murders within one of the colleges.