Bodies pile up fast in Philippa Gregory’s latest Tudor romp, both in the bedroom and on the scaffold. The Boleyn Traitor, like The Other Boleyn Girl and The Constant Princess before it, follows a court transfixed by two things: who is sleeping with Henry VIII and who might lose their head as a result. Our guide through these subtleties is Jane Rochford, the shrewd wife of Anne Boleyn’s brother George, and one of three narrators we met in Gregory’s 2006 The Boleyn Inheritance. Here, hers is our only narratorial voice.

Jane is an excellent courtier. For almost 500 pages, the reader watches her swerve the disasters that crop up as Henry disposes of four queen consorts. Gregory’s narrative, which begins with Anne Boleyn struggling to conceive a male heir for her tyrannical husband, bounces through Henry’s subsequent dalliances until we