Henry Tudor Must Die by Jillian Laine Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: alternate history, historical fantasy, historical fiction
Pages: 368
Published by Berkley / Penguin Random House on July 21, 2026
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads
One queen exiled. Another headed for the gallows. Both hungry for revenge. England’s most infamous queens set out to reclaim their story and unite in vengeance against Henry VIII.
Anne Boleyn is going to die, and neither her cleverness nor her witchery can save her. So when her late rival, Catalina de Aragón, miraculously appears in her cell at the Tower of London on the eve of her execution, very much alive and offering a daring escape plan, no one is more surprised than Anne.
Lina doesn’t have Anne’s magic—but she has just as much hate for England’s wretched king. Severed from her daughter and stripped of all her influence, Lina breathes only for the Hellebore Sisterhood, a clandestine and powerful society with a vested interest in keeping both queens alive…and using their particular skills to advance womankind.
Anne and Lina’s old rivalries pale in comparison to a common enemy. One by one, they capture their pawns, infiltrating the court, recruiting the new queens in Henry’s orbit, and eliminating the men who plotted against them. Always inching closer to their true target…
And they want his head.
My Review:
This alternate, paranormally tinted historical fantasy of the Tudors begins, but not with Henry VIII’s whirlwind, clandestine courtship of Anne Boleyn. It begins at the other end of the story – or what should be the end of the story. With Anne imprisoned in the Tower of London, the night before her execution.
Her intended execution, which is where the story takes a turn into the paranormal and the fantastic.
At first, Anne thinks her visitor is the ghost of her misdeeds. Catherine of Aragon is the very LAST person Anne expects to see – except as an apparition or a hallucination. And not just because, her predecessor has been dead and buried for four months.
Well, someone is buried in Catherine of Aragon’s grave – but it isn’t the woman who has come to facilitate Anne’s escape from the headsman’s axe. In spite of the enmity between them.
The former queen, who buried her old life in that grave along with a dead woman who resembled her just enough, has brought Anne the means of her own deliverance. All Anne will need is two things that she has in abundance – courage and magical power.
Anne Boleyn is a witch. She’s also a member of the Hellebore Sisterhood, a secret society founded by Marguerite of Angouleme, Princess of France and Queen of Navarre. A society dedicated to opening doors for women by any means necessary. Including espionage, seduction and murder.
Anne has always been Marguerite’s agent, and the woman now calling herself Lina has come to bring her home – in spite of her own well-earned misgivings about her former rival AND the means that the Hellebore Sisterhood uses to accomplish their shared goals.
One of which was to drag England out of the Dark Ages by influencing her king. A mission that Anne succeeded at a bit and only temporarily, and has now fallen apart around her – and perhaps them all.
Escape Rating A: It’s hard not to draw parallels between this story and the Queens of Elben series that begins with Six Wild Crowns and continues with Six Savage Thrones. Henry VIII was a towering figure and he towers over both stories as the grotesque villain – but each story takes that origin point and carries it in somewhat different – although equally fascinating – directions.
Six Wild Crowns is the start of an epic fantasy that uses the Tudor era as its springboard and turns Henry’s six queens into the heroines of their own stories. All wrapped in a magical tale of gods and monsters and stolen magic.
Henry Tudor Must Die, OTOH, is an alternate history fantasy in a similar fashion to Genevieve Cogman’s Scarlet Revolution. Instead of turning the world into something utterly different but based on history, it takes the history we know and adds a paranormal element to the world the way that urban fantasy has always done. The world is our world, the history is our history – at least up until the magic that hides in plain sight is revealed to the reader. (Anne Boleyn’s portrait hangs in the halls of Hogwarts, because she was always rumored to be a witch. And like Harry Potter’s world, the world of this book has magic influencing the history we know while hiding from it AND within it.)
All of that being said, what makes THIS story work isn’t so much the history – although it’s well done and a whole lot of fun if you have knowledge of the period, even if that knowledge is mostly from The Tudors, The Six Wives of Henry VIII and, of course, Six.
What makes this story work is the surprising sisterhood between Lina and Anne. They began as enemies because, well, they were. And again, it’s similar to the sisterhoods that develop among Henry’s queens in Six Wild Crowns as Lina and Anne are able to bond once they set aside the ways that they were each manipulated by the men around them – especially Henry. They unite against their common enemy AND around their shared heartbreak. After all, who else would understand their situation better than each other?
What makes it fun is that this female-centric view of Tudor England in general and Henry VIII in particular (and he will seem familiar in a contemporary way that’s hard to ignore) is that this is not just an alternate perspective on the history we know but also an alternate history of the world we know – meaning that history can be changed – and is.
To the point where the ending of this story is more than open enough to continue into a series. One that I would be extremely interested in reading!
