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1540 was the hottest summer of the sixteenth century but Matthew Shardlake was doing his best to hold his legal practice together, which was made more difficult by the fact that he believed himself to be out of favour with Thomas Cromwell. He tried to keep a low profile but when he defended the accused in a most unpopular case – that of a girl accused of brutally murdering her cousin – he found that the king's chief minister had a new assignment for him. Unless he could solve Cromwell's problem his client was likely to die a slow and nasty death.
Cromwell's problem is Greek Fire, the legendary substance with which the Byzantines destroyed the Arab navies. Jack Barack has seen a demonstration and he knows just how impressive the substance it is. Cromwell has told the king about it, but the problem is that the substance has disappeared. Shardlake's assignment is to find the substance and the formula within a matter of days. Few things are as they seem though and Shardlake is worried about whether or not he would like to hand such a deadly weapon to Cromwell when the inevitable result is that an untold number of people will die. To make matters worse Cromwell's grasp on power is slipping.
The writing in this book is of such quality that you will feel and smell Tudor London. It's not written from specific research with every known fact shoe-horned in somewhere, but from a depth of knowledge that leaves you in no doubt that there's a lot more known, but not said. It's not just the intricate political situation which is understood, but the way that people lived and thought – and their limitations.
