As with the previous books, Sansom's narrative is highly visual and Revelation will clearly make a white-knuckle film (a BBC series is reportedly in development starring Kenneth Branagh). I suspect a homage to David Fincher's 1995 film Se7en - the murders are every bit as imaginatively gruesome and symbolic.

It would not be giving too much away to say that the killer is basing his murders on the prophecies of the Book of Revelation, whose apocalyptic visions have recently been opened to the common people through the king's reforms. There have been multiple killings in previous books, but this is the first time Shardlake has found himself on the trail of a serial killer in the modern mould, one who treats killing as both a holy mission and an art form, and takes as much pleasure in teasing his pursuers as in the murders themselves. What Shardlake begins to uncover is more horrifying than anything he and his hot-blooded young assistant Jack Barak have yet had to face. If it fails, they could all lose their heads. When the king's coroner seems to be covering up the murder, Shardlake promises Elliard's widow that he will find the killer, a mission he shares with Archbishop Cranmer, who must keep the investigation a secret from the king. But his quiet working life is shattered when his old friend Roger Elliard, a fellow lawyer, is found with his throat cut in Lincoln's Inn fountain. The year is 1543 and the hunchbacked lawyer and sometime detective Matthew Shardlake has sworn not to involve himself in any more affairs of state after his last brush with the factions of King Henry's court in Sovereign (2007). No, not a round-up of recent headlines, but some of the plot strands in Revelation, the fourth in CJ Sansom's superb Tudor detective series. Violent clashes of radical religious groups tax increases to fund foreign wars whales washed up in the Thames scandalous public care of the mentally ill even references to a man killing prostitutes in East Anglia.

Revelation by cj sansom