Today I'll be giving quick reviews of two C. J.'s.  One is an old friend, C. J. Box of the Joe Pickett novels, the other is a new acquaintance, C. J. Sansom and his Matthew Shardlake series. 

Let’s start with C. J. Box’ Force of Nature.  The Joe Pickett mysteries are among my favorites.  Joe is a game warden in Wyoming, with a wife and three daughters.  His best friend, Nate Romanowski, lives by his own code.  Nate is an honorable man, but provides some tension with Joe’s more law and order approach.  This story revolves around Nate’s past catching up with him, forcing him to a confrontation he has long deferred.

This is an entertaining novel, and we see some depth to both Joe and Nate, but, I hate to say it, the stories are becoming formulaic.  This is not meant to discourage you; if you are looking for light reading you can polish off in a couple of days, you could do a lot worse.  If you crave more depth, look for my review of Jennifer Haigh’s Faith below. 

Our second C. J., Mr. Sansom, in Dissolution, gives us a little more meat but at a slower pace.  The protagonist is Matthew Shardlake, a clerk for Oliver Cromwell during the early English Reformation.  Cromwell has just begun his moves to take down the monasteries, and Shardlake is sent to the abbey of Scarnsea to investigate the murder of another of Cromwell’s agents.  Shardlake is a lawyer, a hunchback, and a reformer.  There are plenty of twists and turns in the plot, and a good evocation of the spirit of the times.  There is anger at the monks dissolute lifestyle, regret at what is being lost, sympathy for the plight of the monks, and a slow dawning that not all reformer’s motives are pure.  This is told from a non-Catholic angle, but is not a Catholic bashing novel.  There were times I wanted to say, “Now hold on a minute, not all monks were like that, but then on the next page the Sansom makes the same point.  This is the first of the Five Matthew Shardlake novels.  I plan to read the next one, Dark Fire, as soon as I can get it from the library.