Dissolution

I've felt for a long time that one thing that mysteries do well is provide structure to a novel, giving the author a  skeleton for hanging characters, setting, etc on.  C. J. Sansom provides yet another example with his novel Dissolution, set in the Tudor period at the height of Cromwell's power, a period I wouldn't normally be particularly interested in.

Sansom manages to work in a fair bit of the politics and history of the time without turning the novel into a history lesson.  More interesting to me, though, was his central character, Matthew Shardlake.  Shardlake is a reformer, somewhat liberal by the standards of the time, but Sansom resists the urge to put a 21st century person into the reign of Henry VIII.  Shardlake's attitudes toward class and religion are pretty regressive, and he's also willfully blind to Cromwell's abuses.  One could easily imagine a version of this novel with Shardlake as the villain of the piece.

My one quibble with the novel is one I have with many historical novels -- Sansom ends up dragging in extraneous historical characters (other than Cromwell, who is important to the novel), where it feels they don't necessarily belong.  But it's hard to run down this novel for a pretty frequent failing in the genre.