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It is the end of winter in 1543 and Henry is wooing Catherine Parr with the intention of making her his sixth wife. This is not popular with Archbishop Cramer as Parr is known to have sympathies to the reformist agenda.
Shardlake has agrees to take on the case of a lad who has been diagnosed as mad and who is in the asylum called Bedlam. People are starting to think that his mania will get him sentenced as a heretic.

On returning home later one evening he discovers a body in the fountain, this is his good friend Roger, and his throat has been cut. Shardlake pledges to Dorothy that he will find Roger's killer and bring him to justice. His initial investigation and the coroners inquiry raise suspicions within him that there is a lot more to the murder that he is being told, and he challenges the coroner after the hearing. He is summoned to Archbishop Cramer's office and is told that this is not the first murder that they have suppressed the details of as there is a suspicion that this will threaten Catherine Parr. Heving successfully avoided the political scheming recently, he is now right back in the middle of it.

So Shardlake begins his investigation, and as he does, he realises that these grisly murders are linked, and have a pattern that brings a chill to his heart. The race is on to find this murderer, before he kills again, but he is always one step ahead and is following Shardlake and his assistant Barak.

Sansom has done it again with this book. Not only do you have dramatic tension as they struggle to find a very clever killer, who knows so much about them, but there are political intrigues, personal conflicts and layers of stories in here. Nicely paced too, with an excellent climax as the events unfold at the end.