This is clearly a book which has generated very subjective reviews here on Amazon, ranging from 1 star to 5 stars. I guess I would put it as a 3.5 star if I could. Personally I preferred it to the Shardlake novels since I found the plot and the historical setting far deeper and more involving that the Tudor books. But there is an interesting (or possibly boring!) similarity between both 'hero's (or protagonists - as Sansum clearly wants to avoid the hero label). Both are politicallly ambivalent, carry the weight of an affliction (being a hunchback in Shardlake; shell-shock in Harry); both show a humanity and compassion which (particularly in Shardlake) is slightly out of kilter with the time in which they're supposedly living. Having said that and in contrast to some of the reviwes here, I found the situation involving from the start when Harry is recruited as an almost reluctant spy and sent to Spain to spy on an old school-friend. The plot unrolls well but the writing is extremely pedestrian. Another reviwer here has (hilariously) pointed out the number of times characters bite their lips; for me, I was irritated to laughter by the number of times people other blink back their tears or else feel sick to their stomachs: yes, real people might feel/do both these things, but in this case it's a lazy writer's shorthand that avoids delineating emotion in a more meanful way. I also found the narrative strategy of flashbacks both clumsy and predictable. Sansom, after 4 published novels, really needs to work out other ways of telling his story, and other ways of describing characters without a predictable one-liner describing their appearance as soon as a new characters appears (he was a tall man with receding black hair etc...) Some people thought the book only really perked up at the end, but I actually thought the final action sequences seemed awkward and out of place in this story, especially as the characters of both Harry and the woman suddenly seemed to change. The story kind of hangs too after that flurry of action ending oddly (as if the writer got bored?) mid-way through the scene, and were left with a 7-year later epilogue that ties up what happened in a very perfunctory way. So over all I have rounded up my rating to a 4-star since I found the story compelling - despite the extreme mediocrity of the writing style.