Summer, 1546. Shardlake is unexpectedly summoned to Whitehall Palace and asked for help by Catherine Parr. She has written a radically Protestant confessional book, that must never come to the King's attention. Now it has - inexplicably - vanished. Only one page has been found, clutched in the hand of a murdered London printer. Shardlake's investigations take him from the backstreet printshops of London to the dark and labyrinthine world of the royal court; a world he had sworn never to enter again.