This won't be one of those. By peculiar coincidence I was reading this at the same time as two other books with a Tudor setting, the sternly historical Anglicising the Government of Ireland and the less factually based Doctor Who ebook A Handful of Stardust. Revelation is set a bit earlier, in the last years of the reign of Henry VIII, and involves an established character, lawyer Matthew Shardlake, pursuing a serial killer who is repeating the opening of the seals in the Book of Revelation. I quite enjoyed the mystery and some of the chrome (the henchman's unhappy marriage, the African doctor) but thought that Sansom laid it on a bit thick in invoking Copernicus and other contemporary thinkers (De revolutionibus orbium cœlestium as a topic of conversation in London in its year of publication? Hardly!) and also overestimates the power of the Tudor police state in successfully covering up gruesome murders, particularly the ones it wasn't actually responsible for. Hilary Mantel catches the idiom of the period much more convincingly in Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies. But it is entertaining enough.
April Books 11) Revelation, by C. J. Sansom
This won't be one of those. By peculiar coincidence I was reading this at the same time as two other books with a Tudor setting, the sternly historical Anglicising the Government of Ireland and the less factually based Doctor Who ebook A Handful of Stardust. Revelation is set a bit earlier, in the last years of the reign of Henry VIII, and involves an established character, lawyer Matthew Shardlake, pursuing a serial killer who is repeating the opening of the seals in the Book of Revelation. I quite enjoyed the mystery and some of the chrome (the henchman's unhappy marriage, the African doctor) but thought that Sansom laid it on a bit thick in invoking Copernicus and other contemporary thinkers (De revolutionibus orbium cœlestium as a topic of conversation in London in its year of publication? Hardly!) and also overestimates the power of the Tudor police state in successfully covering up gruesome murders, particularly the ones it wasn't actually responsible for. Hilary Mantel catches the idiom of the period much more convincingly in Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies. But it is entertaining enough.
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