Matthew Shardlake

About the Matthew Shardlake series

C. J. Sansom's Shardlake novels follow Matthew Shardlake, a hunchbacked lawyer in the reign of Henry VIII, who investigates murder and conspiracy against the backdrop of Tudor England's most dangerous decades. Dissolution opens in 1537 with Shardlake sent to investigate a killing at a monastery on the eve of Henry's dissolution of the monasteries, and the series follows him across the following decade through the fall of Thomas Cromwell, the king's later marriages, the Boulogne campaign, and finally, in Tombland, Kett's Rebellion in the reign of the boy-king Edward VI.

The appeal is Sansom's exacting historical research (he holds a PhD in history) paired with proper whodunit plotting: Shardlake is an outsider by physical disability in a society openly hostile to it, which gives him a sharp, sympathetic vantage point on Tudor law, religion, and politics, while real historical figures — Cromwell, Cranmer, Catherine Parr — move through the story around him. These are dense, serious novels (several run past 600 pages) that use detective plots to dramatize a genuinely turbulent, dangerous period of English history, rather than costume-drama window dressing.

Complete at seven novels, it's a natural next stop for readers of Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall trilogy who want the same era rendered as historical crime fiction rather than literary fiction — meticulous, morally serious, and unafraid of Tudor England's genuine brutality.