Revelation is the fourth in a series of historical thrillers that are to Ellis Peters what P.D. James is to Agatha Christie. It works as a stand-alone novel, but aficionados will feel they are rejoining a party, catching up with old friends. Opening a C. J. Sansom is like time travel. Here we are again in the erudite and anxious mind of Matthew Shardlake, strolling through the Tudor Inns of Court, nodding at friends, cutting old enemies, picking up the latest gossip on the King's matrimonial intentions, Protestant ranters and Catholic recusants, brushing away sturdy beggars but throwing a coin or two to the needy poor.

Many among the ragged crowd are the flotsam and jetsam of the monasteries closed by Henry VIII to advance the cause of an English Church, get himself a seductive young wife and line his own pockets. Shardlake, now nearing 40 and with grey hairs as well as a humpback, does not seek out the dangers that come his way, but his keen legal brain and endearing capacity for compassion have so far led to his involvement in three politically delicate and personally perilous adventures.

The theme of this book is the crisis of faith assailing post-Reformation England. Matthew was a reformer in his youth and a follower of Erasmus, but all he has experienced of political corruption, spiritual timeserving and hot-gospellers has led him to the brink of agnosticism, and he now rarely goes to church. He is comfortably settled in Lincoln's Inn with the stalwart, hot-headed Barak, and a job that suits him well: sergeant of law in the Court of Requests, furthering poor men's pleas. He is still wistfully hopeful of love, and when his old friend, Roger Elliard, is murdered with horrific ostentation, his determination to hunt down his killer is allied to dreams of eventually winning the hand of Roger's wife, Dorothy, the girl to whom he was too shy to propose when he was young.

It emerges that Roger's death is part of a pattern of ferocious murders of erstwhile radicals mirroring torments prophesied in the Book of Revelation. The political ramifications are great. Archbishop Cranmer is treading a perilous middle road between royal conservatism and his own reformist convictions, and the murders could threaten the hoped-for marriage of Henry and Catherine Parr. Shardlake is summoned to find the serial killer. But though Cranmer is a more benign master than Thomas Cromwell, he, too, it emerges, will risk Shardlake's life for what he sees as the greater good.

There is more than one storyline to follow: Barak's and Tamasin's marriage is on the rocks after the stillbirth of their baby and he has taken to drink; an obsessively praying boy in Bedlam, the city's madhouse, has to be protected from conviction as a heretic, and Matthew's old friend, Guy, the Moorish ex-monk whose medical skills and psychological acumen will as usual prove to be crucial aids, has become far too preoccupied with his handsome, clever and calculating new apprentice, Piers. The intertwining elements of all these side issues - and the royal courtship - will eventually contribute, like the motifs of a concerto, to the the novel's spectacular climax.

Sansom's deft sense of dramatic timing takes us effortlessly through this fat, juicy book. For a while we jog along, building up connections, clues, suspense, and then wham, bang we're off at a skimble-scamble gallop. His skill lies not only in plotting and the creation of rounded and memorable characters, but in magicking up a richly textured backdrop: the buildings, weather, stench and clamour of London and Westminster, with their higgledy-piggledy houses, inns and tanneries, brickworks and brothels, even wayside flowers. We feel confident that the Thames did indeed freeze over in 1543. The best Shardlake yet.

Revelation by C. J. Sansom
Macmillan, £17.99

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