I devoured "Dissolution". We dive with delight into a cruel era, that of the reign of Henry VIII, after the death of Jane Seymour, his third wife, while Thomas Cromwell, protesting ruthless, heads the kingdom with an iron hand. It must dissolve the monasteries to retrieve their fortunes for the benefit of the royal treasury and funds to eradicate the practices of these monks too attached to Catholicism sincerely for having converted to the new Anglican religion. Only, here, somewhere, on the south coast, a "commissioner" sent by Cromwell was brutally murdered. It will therefore send up a sleuth, the hunchback lawyer Matthew Shardlake, a humanist, also Protestant and convinced of the merits of these solutions. He will have to investigate the heart of winter in this closed world, covered with a blanket of snow ice, inhabited by monks to unmentionable secrets, deep wounds and motivations far from holy. He will be assisted by Mark, his assistant, a young man whose strength of character will be revealed in the presence of Alice, the only woman working in the monastery and our lawyer who can help feeling an unreasonable feeling, saw his infirmity. Matthew Sharlake go until the end of his mission but found in shaken in his convictions.
The narrative style of CJ Samson, the richness of the language but also its elegance, mysterious and endearing characters, icy atmosphere of this closed world, everything contributes to the pleasure of reading this novel, first in a series I well promise to read the following.