‘Shardlake’ series review: A thrilling Tudor-era whodunit

We obviously cannot have enough of the Tudors! There is the excellent Wolf Hall based on Hilary Mantel’s Booker Prize winning novels, the techno and rap-infused Blood Sex & Royalty, the rather annoying Anne Boleyn and the original bodice-ripper The Tudors with Jonathan Rhys Meyers making for an incendiary Henry and Henry Cavill burning up the screen as Charles Brandon. Shardlake Episodes: 4 Run time: 47 to 54 minutes Director: Justin Chadwick Starring: Arthur Hughes, Sean Bean, Anthony Boyle, Babou Ceesay, Paul Kaye, Ruby Ashbourne Serkis, Matthew Steer, Brian Vernel, Peter Firth, Irfan Shamji, David Pearse, Miles Barrow, Mike Noble, Kimberley Nixon Storyline: When a Commissioner in charge of closing a monastery is murdered, Cromwell orders the lawyer Shardlake to investigate While most of the above deal with royalty, Shardlake, based on C. J. Sansom’s bestselling novels, deals with regular people whose lives are also immeasurably changed by the political maneuvering happening in high places. When one of Cromwell’s commissioners, Robin Singleton, is killed at St Donatus, a monastery in the port town of Scarnsea, in Sussex, the lawyer Matthew Shardlake is sent to find the truth and shut down the monastery. Sansom wrote seven novels featuring Shardlake, and further seasons seem to be indicated with the introduction of Barak instead of Mark Poer as in Dissolution, the first novel, which the series is based on.