Murder in the twelfth century is no different from murder today. There is still a dead body, though this time with an arrow through the heart instead of a bullet. There is still a need to bury the dead, to comfort the living – and to catch the murderer. When Brother Cadfael comes to a village in the Welsh hills, he finds himself doing all three of those things. And there is nothing simple about this death. The murdered man’s daughter needs Cadfael’s help in more ways than one. There are questions about the arrow. And the burial is the strangest thing of all.

In the year of our Lord 1141, two monks ride into the Benedictine abbey of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, bringing with them disturbing news of war–and a mystery. The strangers tell how the strife between the Empress Maud and King Stephen has destroyed the town of Winchester and their priory. Now Brother Humilis, who is handsome, gaunt, and very ill, and Brother Fidelis, youthful, comely, and totally mute, must seek refuge at Shrewsbury. And from the moment he meets them, Brother Cadfael senses something deeper than their common vows binds these two good brothers. What the link is he can only guess–what it will lead to is beyond his imagining. But as Brother Humilis’ health fails, Brother Cadfael faces a poignant test of his discretion and his beliefs as he unravels a secret so great it can destroy a life, a future, and a holy order.

This delightful blend of suspense and historical fiction is, indeed, an excellent mystery.

Sparks fly when two famous folksingers and former lovers encounter each other at a folk music seminar. When one of them disappears, Dominic Felse and his girlfriend Tossa struggle to find an explanation. Although he doesn’t know it, Dominic holds one of the most important clues to solving the mystery.

When the village of Shrewsbury’s own sheriff, Gilbert Prestcote, is taken prisoner by the Empress Maud’s forces, its citizens are prepared to exchange him for a man of equal value they have within their possession. But soon after Prestcote arrives for the prisoner exchange, he dies. Was it death by natural causes or a most unnatural murder?

In the early twelfth century, civil war rages between the English and the Welsh. In the battle of Lincoln, the Welsh capture the sheriff of Shropshire and barter him for a young Welsh lord, who had been captured during a misguided assault on a convent. But before the exchange can be completed, one of the prisoners mysteriously dies.

Brother Cadfael suspects foul play—his theory hinging on a single thread that binds together the destinies of an unusual trio of young lovers. The unraveling of their tale yields a powerful subtext that explores the nature of love, identity, and divided loyalty.

Alfred Armiger was like a bull in the ring, belligerent and sure of himself. But Armiger was mortal after all. There was no stronger proof of it than the blood that oozed from his skull, mingling with the red wine he’d spilled on the floor at the moment of impact.

Despite all evidence, world-class singer Maggie Tressider is convinced that she has killed someone. Her doctor suggests a psychiatrist, but Maggie hires a private investigator named Francis Killian to exorcise the demons that haunt her. But as Killian follows the paths that comprise Maggie’s past, he begins to suspect the singer’s fears are justified.

When the castle of Shrewsbury is taken during the war between Empress Maud and King Stephen, 94 prisoners are taken, 94 are hanged. When Brother Cadfael arrives to perform the burial rites, he finds one corpse too many among the bodies stacked about the fortress.

In 1978, in the final, bloodiest phase of the Rhodesian civil war, eleven-year-old Lauren St John moves with her family to Rainbow’s End, a wild, beautiful farm and game reserve set on the banks of a slowflowing river. The house has been the scene of a horrific attack by guerrillas, and when Lauren’s family settles there, a chain of events is set in motion that will change her life irrevocably. Rainbow’s End captures the overwhelming beauty and extraordinary danger of life in the African bush. Lauren’s childhood reads like a girl’s own adventure story. At the height of the war, Lauren rides through the wilderness on her horse, Morning Star, encountering lions, crocodiles, snakes, vicious ostriches, and mad cows. Many of the animals are pets, including Miss Piggy and Bacon and an elegant giraffe named Jenny. The constant threat of ruthless guerrillas prowling the land underscores everything, making each day more dangerous, vivid, and prized than the last. After Independence, Lauren comes to the bitter realization that she’d been on the wrong side of the civil war. While she and her family believed that they were fighting for democracy over Communism, others saw the war as black against white. And when Robert Mugabe comes into power, he oversees the torture and persecution of thousands of members of an opposing tribe and goes on to become one of Africa’s legendary dictators. The ending of this beautiful memoir is a fist to the stomach as Lauren realizes that she can be British or American, but she cannot be African. She can love it — be willing to die for it — but she cannot claim Africa because she is white.

St. Peter’s Fair was a grand event, attracting merchants from across England and beyond. With the pause in the Civil War during the summer of 1139, the fair would bring some much-needed gaiety to Shrewsbury.

But a wealthy merchant is found murdered in the river Severn. Brother Cadfael offers to help the merchant’s niece, Emma; but while he searches for the killer, two more men are murdered—like her uncle, apparently for the valuables they possessed at their death. Cadfael races to save the young woman, knowing that during Civil War, betrayal can come from any direction, and even good intentions can kill.

King Stephen’s bloody siege against the town of Shrewsbury has reduced many of its stores and homes to rubble. The townspeople, busy preparing for the annual St. Peter’s Fair, complain that the Shrewsbury monks have not shouldered their fair share of the burden. Cadfael, hoping to assuage flaring tempers, is drawn into a worse kind of violence on the eve of the festival.

Outside the pale of the Abbey of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, in September of the year of our Lord 1140, a priestly emissary for King Stephen has been reported missing. But inside the pale, what troubles Brother Cadfael is a proud, secretive nineteen-year-old novice. Brother Cadfael has never seen two men more estranged than the Lord of Aspley and Meriet, the son he coldly delivers to the abbey to begin a religious vocation. Meriet, meek by day, is so racked by dreams at night that his howls earn him the nickname the Devil’s Novice. Shunned and feared, Meriet is soon linked to the missing priest’s dreadful fate. Only Brother Cadfael believes in Meriet’s innocence, and only the good sleuth can uncover the truth before the boy’s pure passion leads him to the noose.

Outside the pale of the Abbey of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, in September of the year of our Lord 1140, a priestly emissary for King Stephen has been reported missing. But inside the pale, what troubles Brother Cadfael is a proud, secretive nineteen-year-old novice.

Brother Cadfael has never seen two men more estranged than the Lord of Aspley and Meriet, the son he coldly delivers to the abbey to begin a religious vocation. Meriet, meek by day, is so racked by dreams at night that his howls earn him the nickname the Devil’s Novice. Shunned and feared, Meriet is soon linked to the missing priest’s dreadful fate. Only Brother Cadfael believes in Meriet’s innocence, and only the good sleuth can uncover the truth before the boy’s pure passion leads him to the noose.

The year is 1142. England is in the iron grip of civil war, and within the sheltered cloisters of the Benedictine Abbey of St. Peter and St. Paul, there begins a chain of events no less momentous than the upheavals of the outside world.

First, there is the sad demise of the Lord of Eaton, whose ten-year-old son and heir, the young Richard, is a pupil at the abbey. The boy refuses to surrender his new powers to his formidable grandmother, Dionysia. Then there is the arrival of the hermit Cuthred, who enjoys the protection of Lady Dionysia, and whose young companion, Hyacinth, befriends Richard. Despite his reputation for holiness, Cuthred’s arrival heralds a series of mishaps for the monks. When Richard disappears and a corpse is found in Eyton Forest, Brother Cadfael is once more forced to leave the tranquility of his herb garden and devote his knowledge of human nature to tracking down a ruthless murderer.

Shortly after he inherits the powerful position of Lord of Eaton, 10-year-old Richard Ludel disappears from Shrewsbury Abbey, where he had been a student. Did he run away or was he kidnapped? Brother Cadfael suspects the hermit of Eyton Forest, a mysterious man rumored to have holy powers, knows the answer.

The day after a Gothic door is returned to its original place in the Mottisham village church, two men are found dead. The Welsh villagers, closed and suspicious of outsiders, believe their deaths were not accidental, but part of an ancient legend that told of an unrepentant monk who tried to enter to the church by grasping the door’s iron knocker.

Setting out for the Saint Giles leper colony outside Shrewsbury, Brother Cadfael has more pressing matters on his mind than the grand wedding coming to his abbey. Yet as fate would have it, Cadfael arrives at Saint Giles just as the nuptial party passes the colony’s gates. He sees the fragile bride, looking like a prisoner between her two stern guardians, and the bridegroom–an arrogant, fleshy aristocrat old enough to be her grandfather–and he quickly discerns that this union may be more damned than blessed.

Indeed, a savage murder will interrupt the May-December marriage and leave Brother Cadfael with a dark, terrible mystery to solve. The key to the killing–and a secret–is hidden among the lepers of Saint Giles. Now, Brother Cadfael’s skills must ferret out a sickness not of the body, but of a twisted soul.

As England’s civil war draws to a close, two travelers arrive at Cadfael’s herbarium door: the dark-eyed Ciaran who has vowed to walk unshod as a kind of penance and, his companion, Matthew. When Cadfael’s old friend arrives with a tale of murder, the youths’ puzzling association becomes darker and more inscrutable.

In the year of our Lord 1141, civil war over England’s throne leaves a legacy of violence–and the murder of a knight dear to Brother Cadfael. In the spring, a flood of pilgrims comes to the celebration of Saint Winifred at the Abbey, carrying with it many strange souls…and perhaps the knight’s killer.

Brother Cadfael’s shrewd eyes see all: the prosperous merchant who rings false; an angelic, lame boy and his beautiful, dowerless sister; and two wealthy penitents. In the name of justice, Cadfael sets out to uncover the strange and twisted tale that accompanies these travelers. Instead, he unearths a quest for vengeance, witnesses a miracle, and finds himself on a razor’s edge between death or the absolution of love.

After years of studying with the Bishop, young Father Ailnoth has come to take over the parish of Holy Cross. But soon Ailnoth’s true nature surfaces-harsh, cold-hearted, and merciless-and someone lures him from his home and murders him. Who in Shrewsbury would kill a priest on Christmas Day?

Christmas, AD 1141 Abbot Radulfus returns from London, bringing with him a priest for the vacant living of Holy Cross (known as the Foregate), a man of presence, scholarship and discipline, but neither humility nor the common touch. When he is found drowned in the mill-pond, suspicion is cast in many directions, not least towards a young man who came in the priest’s train, sent to work in Brother Cadfael’s garden. For he has little obvious priestly calling. Indeed, he soon attracts the friendship of a girl both beautiful and formidable.

To Brother Cadfael is left the familiar task of sorting the complicated strands that define guilt and innocence.

A wealthy widow rents her house to the Shrewsbury Abbey for the price of a single rose cut from the bush near the house. Shortly before the rent is due, the rosebush is destroyed and the widow kidnapped. Brother Cadfael must discover who stands to gain from these peculiar crimes.

A late spring in 1142 has the monks of Shrewsbury Abbey dismayed, for there may be no roses by June 22. For three years, wealthy young widow Judith Perle has rented her house to the monks for the price of a single white rose each year, in honor of her late husband. When nature finally complies, a pious monk is sent to pay the rent–and found murdered beside the hacked rosebush.

Without a rose, the monks’ rental contract becomes void, adding greatly to the widow’s dowry. But before Brother Cadfael can ponder whether a greedy suitor has done this dreadful deed, another crime is committed. Now the good monk must thread his way through a tangle more tortuous than the widow’s thorny bushes and root out a killer.

On a spring evening in 1140 Shrewsbury, the midnight matins at the Benedictine abbey suddenly reverberate with an unholy sound–a hunt in full cry. Pursued by a drunken mob, the quarry is running for its life. When the frantic creature bursts in to claim sanctuary, Brother Cadfael finds himself fighting off armed townsmen to save a terrified young man.

Accused of robbery and murder is Liliwin, a wandering minstrel who performed at the wedding of a local goldsmith’s son. The cold light of morning, however, will show his supposed victim still lives, although a strongbox lies empty. Brother Cadfael believes Liliwin is innocent, but finding the truth and the treasure before Liliwin’s respite in sanctuary runs out may uncover a deadlier sin than thievery–a desperate love that not even the threat of hanging can stop.

This finely written tale is another gem from the master of medieval intrigue.

The winter of 1139 will disrupt Brother Cadfael’s tranquil life in Shrewsbury, as raging civil war has sent refugees fleeing north from Worcester. Among them are two young orphans from a noble family and their companion, a young Benedictine nun. The trio, never reaching Shrewsbury, has disappeared somewhere in the wild countryside.

Cadfael fears for these three lost lambs, but another call for help sends him to the Church of Saint Mary. A wounded monk by the roadside will surely die without Cadfael’s healing arts. Why this holy man has been attacked and what his fevered ravings reveal soon give Brother Cadfael a clue to the fate of the missing travelers. Now Cadfael sets out on a dangerous quest to find them–and the road will lead him to a terrible murder and a tale of passion gone awry. This is Ellis Peters’ most stunning depiction yet of love and war.