If what gripped you in The Devil in the Marshalsea was how vividly the Marshalsea’s fee-gouging system, the Common Side’s squalor, and William Acton’s abuses came alive as Tom Hawkins probed a prison murder, you’ll relish how Matthew Shardlake investigates a killing inside the monastery at Scarnsea. Sansom renders Tudor bureaucracy, monastic politics, and petty tyrannies with the same granular authenticity, so each clue feels embedded in a fully functioning—and rotten—world.

You survived the Marshalsea’s filth with Tom Hawkins and his ominous cellmate Samuel Fleet; now brave plague-ravaged 1665 London with thief-taker Charlie Tuesday hunting a ritual killer. Like Hodgson’s brutal debtors’ prison and its predatory economy, Quinn’s London is viscerally dangerous—alleys, pesthouses, and death-carts close in as Charlie’s chase turns as grim and relentless as Tom’s race to unmask a murderer before he pays with his neck.

If you were drawn to Tom Hawkins’s rake-turned‑reluctant sleuth—gambling debts, sharp tongue, and all—as he navigated Marshalsea deals and Samuel Fleet’s manipulations, you’ll click with James Marwood, a government informer investigating murders in the chaos after the Great Fire. Marwood and Cat Lovett both make morally messy choices to stay alive and get to the truth, echoing Tom’s slippery bargains inside Acton’s corrupt prison walls.

If Tom Hawkins’s intimate, first‑person account pulled you straight into the Marshalsea—his fear of the Common Side, his wary dance with Samuel Fleet, his urgent hunt for a killer—Edward Glyver’s dark confession will grip you just as tightly. From the opening murder to his scheming pursuit of Phoebus Daunt, Glyver’s I‑narration makes every twist feel personal, placing you in the mind of a man whose need for truth and vengeance keeps tightening like a noose.

Tom Hawkins has days to find a murderer in the Marshalsea or face ruin—every step shadowed by Acton’s power and Fleet’s secrets. In The Alienist, Dr. Laszlo Kreizler, John Schuyler Moore, and Sara Howard race through Gilded Age New York to profile and stop a serial killer before he strikes again. The same propulsive, goal‑driven momentum drives both stories: every clue matters, every delay costs, and the city’s institutions can be as dangerous as the culprit.