While Smith's seventh novel featuring Scottish philosopher and woman of means Isabel Dalhousie (after The Lost Art of Gratitude) doesn't break new ground, the author's many fans will be more than satisfied to follow the small events of Isabel's life, in particular her struggle to come to terms with her own imperfections. Much to Isabel's dismay, Prue, a cellist with a terminal illness who's a professional colleague of her bassoonist fiancé, Jamie, has been making ever greater demands on the good-natured Jamie.
Graham Marshall's ambition has made him a professional success, and he has the usual domestic problems to prove it. When he is passed over for promotion by an ambitious colleague he is shocked, but not half as shocked as when he is implicated in a murder, but is it by accident or design?
Successful lawyer Mark Dooher has killed his wife of 20 years in order to marry a beautiful young female colleague. But suspicions of his guilt begin to tear his life apart, as the homicide chief gets closer to the truth.
In March 1543, while London buzzes about Henry VIII's campaign to win newly widowed Lady Catherine Parr for his sixth wife, hunchbacked barrister Matthew Shardlake has grimmer matters on his mind in Sansom's gripping fourth Tudor historical (after 2007's Sovereign). Not only has his close friend and colleague Roger Elliard been savagely murdered but Shardlake finds himself assigned the incendiary case of a young religious fanatic committed to Bedlam.
