
In the east the German war with Russia, now eleven years old, shows no sign of ending.

Sansom himself was "Very Highly Commended" in the 2007 CWA Dagger in the Library award, for the Shardlake series. He has also written Winter in Madrid, a thriller set in Spain in 1940 in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War.ĭark Fire won the 2005 Ellis Peters Historical Dagger, awarded by the Crime Writers' Association (CWA). Sansom has been consulted on the series, which is in the final stages of negotiation. The rest of the Shardlake books are expected to follow. The BBC have commissioned an adaptation of Dissolution with the actor Kenneth Branagh set to star as Shardlake. Shardlake works on commission initially from Thomas Cromwell in Dissolution and Dark Fire and then Thomas Cranmer in Sovereign and Revelation. He came to prominence with his series set in the reign of Henry VIII in the 16th century, whose main character is the hunchbacked lawyer Matthew Shardlake. He practised for a while in Sussex as a lawyer for the disadvantaged, before quitting in order to work full-time as a writer. After working in a variety of jobs, he decided to retrain as a solicitor. He was born in 1952 and was educated at the University of Birmingham, where he took a BA and then a PhD in history. Ĭhristopher John "C.J." Sansom is an English writer of crime novels. And hard on their heels is Gestapo Sturmbannfuhrer Gunther Hoth, brilliant, implacable hunter of men. Before long he, together with a disparate group of Resistance activists, will find themselves fugitives in the midst of London’s Great Smog as David’s wife Sarah finds herself drawn into a world more terrifying than she ever could have imagined.

Civil Servant David Fitzgerald, secretly acting as a spy for the Resistance, is given by them the mission to rescue his old friend Frank and get him out of the country. And in a Birmingham mental hospital an incarcerated scientist, Frank Muncaster, may hold a secret that could change the balance of the world struggle forever. In Britain, Winston Churchill's Resistance organisation is increasingly a thorn in the government's side.

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There are terrible rumours too about what is happening in the basement of the German Embassy at Senate House. As the long German war against Russia rages on in the east, the British people find themselves under dark authoritarian rule: the press, radio and television are controlled the streets patrolled by violent auxiliary police and British Jews face ever greater constraints. Twelve years have passed since Churchill lost to the appeasers, and Britain surrendered to Nazi Germany after Dunkirk.
