Heartstone - C.J. Sansom (Matthew Shardlake #5)

Summer, 1545.

England is at war. King Henry VIII’s invasion of France has gone badly wrong, and a massive French fleet is preparing to sail across the Channel. As the English fleet gathers at Portsmouth, the country raises the largest militia army it has ever seen. The King has debased the currency to pay for the war, and England is in the grip of soaring inflation and economic crisis.

Meanwhile, Matthew Shardlake is given an intriguing legal case by an old servant of Queen Catherine Parr, which will lead him into the corrupt labyrinth of the King’s Court of Wards. Asked to investigate claims of "monstrous wrongs" committed against his young ward Hugh Curteys by Sir Nicholas Hobbey, a Hampshire landowner, which have already involved one mysterious death, Shardlake and his assistant, Barak, journey to Portsmouth. Shardlake has taken the case, despite the imminent threat of invasion, as it also gives him the opportunity to investigate the mysterious past of Ellen Fettiplace, a young woman incarcerated in the Bedlam whom he has befriended and whose family once lived nearby.

Arrived in Portsmouth, Shardlake and Barak find themselves in a city preparing to become a battle zone. The mysteries surrounding the seemingly normal Hobbey family, and the events that destroyed Ellen’s family nineteen years before, involve Shardlake in reunions both with an old friend and an old enemy close to the throne. Events will converge on board one of the King’s great warships, gathered in Portsmouth harbour, waiting to sail out and confront the approaching French fleet…