If what gripped you in Dissolution was Shardlake working under Thomas Cromwell’s hard glare—being dispatched to Scarnsea to solve Commissioner Singleton’s murder while navigating the king’s will—then Mantel’s Wolf Hall lets you walk straight into Cromwell’s chambers. You’ll see the same knife-edged maneuvering behind the dissolution policy that set Shardlake in motion, as Cromwell juggles Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII, and enemies like More. It’s the backstage drama to the power that made Scarnsea’s fate inevitable.

You enjoyed being locked inside Scarnsea’s priory—snow, silence, and secrets—while Shardlake sifted monks’ alibis and peccadillos. The Name of the Rose traps you in another religious house where a scholar-detective hunts a killer amid forbidden texts and theological quarrels. The closed community, coded manuscripts, and ritual routines will scratch the same itch that the Scarnsea chapter-house interrogations and scriptorium hints did in Dissolution.

If you liked how Dissolution unfolds deliberately—Shardlake and Mark piecing together Singleton’s last movements, revisiting testimonies, and letting small contradictions topple larger lies—Pears’ novel rewards the same patience. Through shifting testimonies around a suspicious death in Restoration Oxford, every account recasts the case the way Cromwell’s agenda kept reframing Scarnsea. The pleasure is in watching careful inquiry pry truth from power.

If the heart of Dissolution for you was its Reformation backdrop—Cromwell’s reforms squeezing Scarnsea, monks torn between conscience and survival—then Q plunges into those same convulsions across Europe. Secret informers, heretical cells, and state agents collide as doctrine becomes a weapon. The moral gray zones that shadowed Shardlake’s interviews with frightened brothers are writ large here, with faith and politics indistinguishable.

If you enjoyed riding inside Shardlake’s head—his dry skepticism, legal precision, and uneasy conscience—as he investigated the killing at Scarnsea, Bayard’s The Pale Blue Eye offers a similarly intimate voice. Retired constable Augustus Landor narrates his probe into a cadet’s death at West Point, with Edgar Allan Poe as his unlikely aide. That first-person scrutiny of clues, interviews, and institutional secrets mirrors the way Shardlake needles through priory walls.