Winter in Madrid

It’s hard to write about this book without giving away the ending. Not that I want to. (I still have murderous thoughts about the boy at school who insisted on telling me how Easy Rider and McCabe and Mrs Miller ended.) It’s just that the power of the book is cumulative and it works because of the slow, steady build-up of detail, character and incident. It’s the pay-off to everything that comes before and it lingers in the mind long after you close the book and put it aside.

I’m also impressed by the way in which C.J. Sansom weaves three main stories – and several minor characters – together, moving back and forth in time without ever once confusing the reader. You always know what’s happening and when it happened.

It’s not a happy book. The portrait of post-Civil War Spain is cold and gloomy: you can feel the drafty rooms and taste the weak coffee, not to mention wince at details I’d never have imagined, such as the packs of wild abandoned dogs that roam the streets of Madrid. Sansom is a historian, and it shows.

Now, if I could only get into the Shardlake series.