C.J. Sansom’s Dissolution introduces us to Dr. Matthew Shardlake, a kyphotic lawyer in the service of King Henry VIII’s Vicar General Thomas Cromwell. The period is shortly after the beheading of Henry’s second wife, Anne Boleyn, and the King’s marriage to Jane Seymour. This was a period of religious revolution in England where Henry declared himself via The Act of Supremacy 1534 "the only Supreme Head in Earth of the Church of England.”
That same year the Treasons Act made it high treason punishable by death to refuse to acknowledge the King as such. Both circumstances loom large in the backdrop of C.J. Sansom’s intricate murder mystery. The book’s title is derived from the dissolution of England’s Catholic Monasteries, ordered by Henry through Cromwell. Henry was given the authority to do this by the Act of Supremacy, along with the First Suppression Act (1536, dissolving smaller monasteries) and the Second Suppression Act (1539, dissolving the remaining monasteries). In April 1536 the Augmentations Office was established to handle the receipt and processing of goods confiscated from the dissolved monasteries.
A government official sent by Cromwell to investigate a large Benedictine Monastery in the fictional Scarnsea, Sussex is found beheaded in the monastery’s kitchen the same day that a rooster is found sacrificed on the Church’s altar and the Church’s relic, The Hand of the Penitent Thief, stolen. Vicar General Cromwell dispatches Commissioner Dr. Matthew Shardlake and his assistant Mark Poer to the monastery to investigate the dead official’s suspicious demise. While the two investigators are in residence at the monastery, several other murders occur, in addition to the attempted murder of Shardlake. As a plot subtext, Shardlake’s developing interpersonal relationship with Poer makes for compelling reading as does Sansom’s use of Shardlake’s deformity as a metaphor of the human condition in battle with the religious striving for spiritual perfection.
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