Sansom gives Shardlake a disfigurement (hunchback, present since his youth) and a profound sense of social inferiority and unease. A solicitor by trade, Shardlake is known less for his legal mind that the significant hunchback he possesses. He came to prominence with his series set in the reign of Henry VIII in the 16th century, whose main character is the hunchbacked lawyer Matthew Shardlake.

To make things even more irritating for him he finds himself competing with his young assistant for the affections of a young lass who works in the infirmary of the monastery.I will admit that “Dissolution” took me a while to get into, despite the fact that its setting and subject matter are right up my alley. This is shortly after King Henry VIII has broken with the Catholic church and created the Church of England, with himself as the head of the church. Se trata de esas obras que me cuesta puntuar y que solo recomendaría para aquellos lectores de este género. This is a book that runs 385 pages which, in my estimation, would have been much better at about 325 pages.

I don’t know why I gave him the hunchback, perhaps it symbolizes the weight he carries as a person of integrity in that grim time. To interpret the time to modern readers, I needed a protagonist who was “apart” from his time—through intellectual rigor and honesty, but also in more subtle ways. The good news is that the mystery is more than entertaining enough to keep the pages turning and to allow Sansom a setting in which he can embellish his story line with a wealth of historic details, atmosphere and character development that I personally found much more entertaining than the story itself.The beheading is sending a personal message to Cromwell as he insists that Shardlake goes there and find out what is going on. That Shardlake cannot see this part of his personality was a stretch- even with a certain amount of denial, a man of his intelligence should have been more aware. But there has been a murder and not just any murder, but the murder of a Cromwell representative while he was investigating the monastery for improprieties.

Cromwell’s own head is lucky to still be setting squarely on his shoulders after he became such an ardent ally of the recently beheaded Anne Boleyn. J. Sansom’s Shardlake books, which are set amid the uncertainties of the 16th-century Henrician Reformation.Sansom takes enough time to impress upon us the general perception that monasteries and other religious houses were seen both as sources of land and revenue for the king and his nobles and also an evil where the abbots, monks, novices, etc. Set in 1537 during the dissolution of the monasteries, the book follows the lawyer Shardlake in his attempts to solve the murder of one of Thomas Cromwell's commissioners in the monastery at the fictional town of Scarnsea on the south coast of England. Far from being in control of his immoral urges, Mortimus’ brutal punishments often land other brothers in the infirmary—or in a coffin. The historical background is phenomenal in this book (the author really knows his stuff) and the murder mystery ain’t bad. I did question the phrase “runcible peas”, (as in Edward Lear's The Owl and the Pussycat poem which mentioned a “runcible spoon” many years later.