Anyone impatiently waiting for their next CJ Sansom fix could do far worse than investigate James Forrester’s excellent new novel Sacred Treason. Set in the early Elizabethan years when it remained unclear if either the young queen or the Protestant faith would last more than five minutes, Sacred Treason does a sterling job bringing to life a London in the grip of paranoia.

The authorities see Catholic plots everywhere, often with good reason, and state security falls to Sir William Cecil and his appointed officer, Francis Walsingham, the regime’s ruthless Plot Hunter General. Walsingham is on the trail of a Catholic plot and will stop at nothing to find a book that is supposedly its trigger. At the same time William Harley, a government bureaucrat and a secret Catholic, receives a desperate midnight visitor carrying something large and bulky under his arm.

Forrester is an academic and a historian, and his deep knowledge of the period floods through every page. As with Sansom, none of this erudition is displayed for its own sake. From high politics to low street life and all points in between, this London comes alive as a real place humming with the lives of real people. Forrester does what very few authors can, namely portray what is an alien landscape with conviction.

The action is exciting but flows logically out of the the plot and at key points throughout the book the tension is ratcheted right up, almost literally once or twice. At it’s heart, this is a simple, head-long race against time book that is actually all the better for this simplicity. Truth be told I would’ve preferred a storyline that didn’t revolve around another secret society and more long buried esoterica that could change the world. But saying that the characters are worth caring about and don’t feel as if they have stepped back in time, the plot charges along at breakneck speed and the whole lot is carried though with an air of authority that is sadly all too rare in historical fiction. Brio I think it’s called.

James Forrester is certainly one to watch and Sacred Treason is that most underrated of things, a damned good read.

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