How to explain the popularity of Sansom's Tudor detective series? The template of the contemporary thriller, applied to a setting (England in the reign of Henry VIII) that is hundreds of years out of step with the conventions, style, action and characters of the genre, has proved a bestselling formula. The hero-narrator, Matthew Shardlake, a hunchbacked barrister, beguiles readers into his world with his modern outlook on relationships and his intuitive (necessary, given the absence of fingerprints, DNA testing et al) solving of grisly crimes. In this tale he is after a serial killer bent on enacting some of the more lurid stuff in the Book of Revelation, against a background of savage religious repression and the monarch's desire to get married to recently widowed Catherine Parr. Anton Lesser gets into the swing of dialogue that mixes detective-fiction idiom and olde English - not quite “Make my day, churl”, but close (Macmillan £16.99, 7 hrs, abridged).

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