The eagerly anticipated new Shardlake novel from the number one bestselling author. Summer, 1546. King Henry VIII is slowly, painfully dying. His Protestant & Catholic councillors are engaged in a final & decisive power struggle; whoever wins will control the government of Henry`s successor, eight-year-old Prince Edward. As heretics are hunted across London, & the radical Protestant Anne Askew is burned at the stake, the Catholic party focus their attack on Henry`s sixth wife, Matthew Shardlake`s old mentor, Queen Catherine Parr. Shardlake, still haunted by events aboard the warship Mary Rose the year before, is working on the Cotterstoke Will case, a savage dispute between rival siblings. Then, unexpectedly, he is summoned to Whitehall Palace & asked for help by his old patron, the now beleaguered & desperate Queen. For Catherine Parr has a secret. She has written a confessional book, Lamentation of a Sinner, so radically Protestant that if it came to the King`s attention it could bring both her & her sympathizers crashing down. But, although the book was kept secret & hidden inside a locked chest in the Queen`s private chamber, it has
- inexplicably
- vanished. Only one page has been found, clutched in the hand of a murdered London printer. Shardlake`s investigations take him on a trail that begins among the backstreet printshops of London but leads him & Jack Barak into the dark & labyrinthine world of the politics of the royal court; a world he had sworn never to enter again. Loyalty to the Queen will drive him into a swirl of intrigue inside Whitehall Palace, where Catholic enemies & Protestant friends can be equally dangerous, & the political opportunists, who will follow the wind wherever it blows, more dangerous than either. The theft of Queen Catherine`s book proves to be connected to the terrible death of Anne Askew, while his involvement with the Cotterstoke litigants threatens to bring Shardlake himself to the stake.