Tudor terror and treachery

TOMBLAND by C.J. Sansom (Mantle £20, 880 pp)

IN THE seventh of the bestselling Matthew Shardlake series, its clever, empathetic, hunchbacked hero is now a serjeant-at-law.

Henry VIII is dead and his sickly son, Edward, is king.

Shardlake is commissioned by Henry’s daughter, Elizabeth, to solve the macabre murder of one of her distant Boleyn relations in Norfolk.

Here, he runs smack into the dangers of a popular uprising against the enclosures that are preventing the people from using their traditional common land.

Legal procedures, the struggle to survive at a time of rampant inflation, the political and religious ferment of the towns and villages . . . Tudor England of 1549 is effortlessly evoked. The murder mystery absorbs, the characters are vivid and the history is seductive, but it’s the author’s inclusive humanity that lingers.

LITTLE by Edward Carey (Gallic £14.99, 430 pp)

EDWARD CAREY’S Gothic tale is a wry meditation on ‘a state between life and death . . . called the waxworks’, as it skirts around the macabre in this story of the early life of Madame Tussaud.

Orphan Anne Marie Grosholtz develops her skills at modelling wax heads under the tutelage of a reclusive anatomist, Dr Curtius.

Her fame spreads through Paris and she is summoned to the French royal household, where she becomes intimate friends with the king’s sister.

In 1789, the revolution engulfs the nation and she finds herself casting waxworks of guillotined victims’ heads, including those of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. Nasty work, but a lifesaver. A rattling narrative is fleshed out with visceral detail and illustrations by the author.

Perhaps not to everyone’s taste, but it is both clever and intriguing.

THE HOUSE ON VESPER SANDS by Paraic O’Donnell (W&N £14.99, 384 pp)

IN ONE of the most arresting opening sections I’ve read, a suicidal seamstress working in Lord Strythe’s town house reveals she has stitched ‘My soul doth magnify the Lord’ into her own skin.

Meanwhile, Gideon Bliss, who is currently studying to take holy orders, searches for the vanished girl he loves and finds her in a Soho church, stretched out in front of the altar, murmuring that the ‘brightness’ must be hidden.

A society columnist with ambitions, Octavia Hillingdon, is on the trail of Lord Strythe, whose profile she is researching, but he, too, has disappeared. Are these elements connected — and why do they lead to the house on Vesper Sands?

A mash-up of Victorian Gothic and fantasy, this is huge fun. Written in shimmering prose, it will please the pernicketiest of fans.