Macmillan £16.99 pp583

Don’t open this book if you have anything urgent pending. Its grip is so compulsive that, until you reach its final page, you’ll have to be almost physically prised away from it. The latest in CJ Sansom’s increasingly thrilling series of 16th-century crime mysteries, it pulls you, like its predecessors, into a tortuous world of Tudor terror.

Its narrator — a hunchbacked lawyer in his late-thirties, Matthew Shardlake — was first seen in Dissolution (2003). Sent by Thomas Cromwell to investigate the grisly murder of a royal commissioner in a monastery near the Kentish marshes, he soon ran into danger. Macabre fatalities piled up in the snowbound monastery: a poisoned novice, a corpse in the frozen fishpond, a monk crushed by a toppled statue, a screaming fall from a bell tower. Beyond this loomed a hinterland of wider menace. In the turbulent England of the Reformation, as Shardlake is always aware, a single false step or unlucky allegiance can prove fatal. Dark Fire (2004), where a child-murder case and a power struggle over the secret of a fearsomely destructive weapon both put him at risk, heightened this sense of personal and political jeopardy.

Set just after Jane Seymour’s death and still shaken by the after-shocks of Anne Boleyn’s beheading, Dissolution shivered in the depths of winter. Dark Fire, where the fiasco of the king’s wedding to Anne of Cleves is running its course, sweated through the hottest summer of the 16th century. Sovereign moves on to the rain-sodden autumn of 1541 when the ageing Henry VIII, accompanied by his 18-year-old bride Catherine Howard, is making his triumphal Progress to York to receive the ceremonial abasement of its civic dignitaries for their city’s part in the abortive Catholic rebellion, the Pilgrimage of Grace, five years earlier.

In York to help process petitions to the king, Shardlake finds himself facing repeated — and inventive — attempts on his life. Could this be connected with his having heard the cryptic last words of a glazier murderously impaled on a shard of a broken abbey window? Has it anything to do with an unwelcome assignment he has been forced into, the supervision of a Catholic rebel en route to the Tower? These and other questions quiver in an atmosphere ever more murky with suspicion, doubt and fear. Shardlake’s threatened plight grows when the court reaches York and high-placed enemies also ring him round. In one climactic scene, he is publicly and sadistically humiliated by the king.

That episode — where the bejewelled and befurred old brute, reeking faintly of gangrene from his ulcered ankle, relishes his power to hurt — puts centre stage a prime concern of Sansom’s fiction. The words “cruel” and “cruelty” recur throughout Sovereign. So do scenes of willingness or eagerness to inflict pain. Torturers, jailers, bullies and tormenters are rife. Trophies of repressive savagery (axed-off heads, a severed leg, a skeleton dangling in chains) bedeck subjugated York and mutely taunt its sullen, cowed populace. One character, already grievously mauled by interrogators, is destined for the horrors of the Tower. Others will be unexpectedly exposed to them.

Often encountering insults and jeers as a hunchback, Shardlake is acutely sensitive to the vulnerabilities of others. Humaneness is as appealing an aspect of him as his inquiring intelligence. Both are put to the test here even more formidably than in the previous books, as a plot of nerve-tingling suspense and brain-teasing deviousness ramifies.

As before, the dramas and detectings are played out amid the vividly evoked racket and rubble of reform. Streets are noisy with the din and thick with the dust of demolished ecclesiastical masonry. Gutted architectural glories, their frescoes scraped back to the stone, stable horses. Workmen crunch through shattered miracles of stained glass.

Exceptionally gifted at re-creating the look, sound and smell of the period, Sansom also excels at capturing its moral and intellectual climate. Collisions of ideology and collusions of religion and politics fascinate him. Winter in Madrid, his fictional foray into civil war Spain, published earlier this year, further testified to this. But it’s in his Tudor novels — of which Sovereign is so intensely imagined an example — that his remarkable talents really blaze out.

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