The Boleyn's bite back in this month's historical fiction: Boleyn Traitor by Philippa Gregory, The Marriage Contract by Sasha Butler, House of Splinters by Laura Purcell

No longer the golden boy of ­Merrie England, Henry VIII is increasingly irascible; he beheads old friends, gets rid of new wives and behaves like a tyrannical monster.

Gregory gloriously reveals the grotesqueries of his reign, seen through the eyes of ­courtier Jane Boleyn, sister-in-law of Anne.

Much maligned as a spy, liar and a traitor, Gregory puts Jane’s sly, secretive ways at the heart of this engrossing drama.

Keeping a watchful eye on the court’s power plays, Jane steps out of the shadows in the last third of the book when she becomes fatally, foolishly embroiled in the affairs of Catherine ­Howard, Henry’s fifth wife, as ­inescapable tragedy engulfs the young, giddy queen.

There’s a timeless quality to this elegantly written story of love lost and found in Elizabethan England.

Thrumming with emotion, Butler’s gorgeous debut ­follows the fate of artistic Eliza Litton.

It’s summer in Worcestershire, 1577, and Eli is in turmoil. Wary of her brutish father’s ­violence, she finds solace in sketching her surroundings, but it’s Francis, the blacksmith’s son, who holds her heart. She longs to be with him, but her father wants to raise his status and orders her to marry gentleman Edmund Cecil.

Heartbroken at the disappearance of Francis, Eliza slowly reconciles herself to her new life, which contains its own secrets, sorrows and joys; and then Francis reappears . . .

There are ­shivers aplenty in Purcell’s return to the ­setting of her first novel The Silent Companions.

The unsettling atmosphere of The Bridge, a remote manor house, is as creepy as ever, as is the way it exerts its unsavoury influence on the Bainbridge family, whose histories are marked by unhappy truths.

Purcell is brilliant at ratcheting up the tension as the family try to make a home in the old mansion, where ancient memories seem to seep from the walls, strange noises are heard at night, and the eerie wooden effigies, collected by Wilfred’s ancestors, seem to move by themselves, as they whisper long-held secrets.

Matters come to a head when Wilfred’s charming, estranged brother returns, and the past and the present collide in a house that’s haunted in more ways than one.