Devil’s Gambit

by Jeri Westerson Book 4 in the King’s Fool Mysteries series.

First published 2026

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4.0(56)

London, 1540. Henry VIII prepares to marry Anne of Cleves, a diplomatic match promoted as part of England’s search for Protestant allies. Will Somers is drawn into trouble when a young German attendant asks for help with her English marriage prospects and a nobleman is murdered in circumstances that threaten scandal. The body’s repeated disappearance and reappearance turns the investigation into farce with lethal stakes, while Will also tries to manage his marriage, his lovers and the increasingly unstable politics around the king’s new queen.

Anne of Cleves arrived in England at a decisive moment for Thomas Cromwell, whose role in arranging the marriage helped make its failure politically dangerous for him. Henry’s dissatisfaction rapidly transformed a dynastic alliance into another court crisis. Westerson uses Will Somers’s closeness to both king and queen to view the marriage from inside the household, while the murder plot exploits the secrecy, crowded chambers and competing loyalties of Tudor court life. The fourth book therefore closes the series amid the same mixture of intimacy and state politics that has defined Will’s investigations.