Shardlake review – murderous monks ignite this magnificent CJ Sansom story

Sean Bean channels his inner-Cromwell in this tale of a loner lawyer investigating a gruesome decapitation at a Tudor monastery. It’s mean, moody – and the perfect tribute to its author who died this week

• ‘I know what it’s like to be stared at’: Shardlake star Arthur Hughes on playing CJ Sansom’s disabled Tudor sleuth

Really, we should wait until winter has come again. To be watching the dark Tudor adventures of Shardlake in bright warming sunlight under blue skies seems entirely wrong – and even more so with the news that CJ Sansom, the author of the series of novels from which the new series is adapted has just died. The books were made to be read with the curtains closed against the elements and by a roaring fire, and this faithful TV recreation feels no different.

Shardlake is a man made solitary and aware of suffering by his physical disability (he is despised as a “crookback” by society and was prevented from entering the priesthood because he “was not made in God’s image”). He works as a lawyer in the service of Henry VIII via Thomas Cromwell (initially – he survives longer than many of his employers, and indeed sovereigns), just as the dissolution of the monasteries gets under way. Shardlake on screen does not let fans of Sansom down. The show was filmed mainly in Hungary, Austria and Romania and the aesthetics are mean, moody and entirely magnificent. The backdrop, and especially the grandeur of the enormous monastery – an amalgam of the medieval Kreuzenstein Castle outside Vienna and the gothic Hunedoara Castle in Transylvania – where most of the monk-murder-mystery action takes place imparts a sense not just of the scale of Henry’s plans for the country’s religious houses, and religion itself, but the absolute audacity of such an undertaking.