Summer 1545. France gathers an armada of its ships to the shores of Albion. England is in danger, and King Henry VIII, despite the crisis gripping the country, spends the last of the money reserves to stand against the enemy. At the request of Queen Catherine Parr, Matthew Shardlake—with his loyal assistant Jack Barrock—travels to Portsmouth, the most vulnerable of the cities located in close proximity to the French warships’ guns.
Shardlake’s assignment is not simple: he must find out everything about a certain young man, brought up in the royal court, and why his former teacher, after visiting the estate where the young man had been taken in, suddenly took his own life… In the world of literary heroes and in the mind of today’s reader, Matthew Shardlake’s image occupies an honorable place among such famous characters as Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, Nero Wolfe, and Commissioner Maigret.