Academic and broadcaster Alice Roberts follows up two previous bestsellers with Crypt, the final piece of a trilogy. Ancestors looked closely at how burials in prehistoric times could educate us about how people lived in that era; Buried took us from Roman to Anglo-Saxon times and into the Middle Ages; Crypt takes us into the tumultuous era of Henry VIII. 

Here, Roberts keeps the reader totally hooked with a modern, CSI-like approach, digging deep into Britain’s past for fresh facts: bones alone, one learns, tell us much about a time of which there is little if any detailed written documentation left. We hear of the archers who drowned when Henry VIII’s ship, the Mary Rose, sank; Thomas Becket, as history records, brutally met his end on the cold stone floor of Canterbury Cathedral, but Roberts not only investigates, detailing every blow dealt out by his assailants, but also shines new light on what Becket’s life was actually like.

Within other chapters, there are grim and revealing findings in a medieval hospital, epidemics, hate speech and prejudice, plus the church and the state relentlessly battling it out for dominance and influence. Crypt is as digestible as Roberts’ previous books in this series: within its pages, history and archaeology collide to make for a final, unputdownable part of an engrossing triptych.