Sansom, "Revelation"

The latest offering from C J Sansom is "Revelation". Matthew Shardlake, the Tudor lawyer/sleuth, pursues a killer around London.
The book is fourth in a series. The first, Dissolution, now looks like a slow start, when one compares it with its successors; Sansom does appear to have just done his own version of Name of the Rose in order to show us the inside of the dissolution of the monasteries. The next two, Dark Fire and Sovereign, used the vehicle of the detective genre to unpack for us genuine mysteries of Tudor England: why the sudden fall of Cromwell at that moment, and why the speculation concerning the lineage of the Tudors? The genre exposits the material: Sansom goes beyond mere detective fiction, opening up (largely fictional, admittedly) new vistas on how history might/might have been.
You'll note I read Sansom as a historian-novelist, and not just a pure novelist.
"Revelation" involves a series of killings driven by a reading of Revelation 15-17. As a Christian, evangelical at that, I might be expected to moan: Revelation is terribly misread by all the characters, and Sansom in his historical note. But the misreadings are historically plausible, and
the character of Cranmer, even that of the King's coroner, never let us see the book as anti-Christian. I would in fact take major issue with brethren objecting to the book.
Finally, Sansom needs to be read as a more serious novelist here: the three mad characters stand for the religious world (make of that what you will). There are those driven to evil by their faith, there are those driven to despair, but then there are those, often overlooked, who quietly love others. Perhaps Swift's dictum should come to mind: "we know enough religion to hate others, but not enough to love" (or something like that).