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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.