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... 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... The best Shardlake yet.

A terrific historical crime novel: a serial killer is at large in Tudor London, where sectarian religious struggles rage and factions at Henry VIII’s court nervously wait to see if Catherine Parr will marry him. Fantastically gripping, as well as brilliantly evocative of feel and preoccupations of period.

The murder mystery is enthralling, but Sansom is intent on the bigger picture. The book has the compulsive quality of a fast-moving narrative, but takes the reader deep into a world where torture and death are not merely endemic but fantastically envisioned at every turn… REVELATION is not merely the title of the book, nor an indication of what Shardlake finally achieves in his search to unmask a murderer. It is the apocalyptic nightmare of the Four Last Things: Hell on earth - and this is a masterly depiction

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. 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… Shardlake has been dubbed 'the Tudor Morse'; like Morse, he is solitary, cerebral, occasionally flawed and driven by a belief in an ideal of justice that stands above the petty rivalries of his profession. He has the same fierce moral core, but he also has a warmth that Morse lacked… The other great appeal of these books, apart from the cast of regular characters, is the richness of Sansom's historical research. He has a doctorate in history and a previous career as a lawyer, but wears his considerable expertise lightly. He also achieves the rare alchemy of combining characters who are sympathetically modern in their psychology with a setting that is authentically historical… [REVELATION] is very skilfully structured - not an incident is wasted - and once the killer's intentions become clear, don't expect to put the book down until you've seen it through to the apocalyptic finale.

This ambitious panorama of a book, the fourth in Sansom's series set in not-so-merrie Tudor England, more than lives up to the promise of the previous three… With wonderful scene-setting that ranges from Bedlam to the well-appointed mansion of the understandably reluctant object of Henry VIII's attentions, newly widowed Catherine Parr, plus some deft plotting, REVELATION is an absorbing and thought-provoking window on the Tudor world.