ISBN: 9781447289180    Publisher: PAN MACMILLAN INDIA Year of publishing: 2016     Format:  Paperback Language: English

The eagerly anticipated new Shardlake novel from the number one bestselling author. Summer 1546. King Henry VIII is slowly painfully dying. His Protestant and Catholic councillors are engaged in a final and decisive power struggle whoever wins will control the government of Henry's successor eight-year-old Prince Edward. As heretics are hunted across London and 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 and asked for help by his old patron the now beleaguered and 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 and her sympathizers crashing down. But although the book was kept secret and 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 and Jack Barak into the dark and 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 and Protestant friends can be equally dangerous and 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.
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C. J. Sansom was educated at Birmingham University where he took a BA and then a Ph.D. in history. After working in a variety of jobs he retrained as a solicitor and practised in Sussex until becoming a full-time writer. Sansom is the bestselling author of the acclaimed Shardlake series the Spanish Civil War thriller Winter in Madrid and the number one bestseller Dominion. He lives in Sussex.
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