Englishwoman Edith Pargeter was not a historian by training, but under the pseudonym Ellis Peters she created one of the most popular detective series—tightly tied to important historical events that shook 12th-century England and Wales, from where Pargeter’s ancestors came.
“The Cadfael Chronicles” is both a political detective story—because its plot unfolds against the backdrop of the civil war between supporters of the lawful claimant to Queen Matilda’s throne and King Stephen of Blois, who seized the crown by force—and classic, intimate stories involving the residents of the town of Shrewsbury and its surroundings, as well as the inhabitants of the Benedictine abbey of Shrewsbury. It is here, in the evening of his life, that an old crusader retired—an experienced soldier who, having taken the name of Brother Cadfael, decided to spend the rest of his days peacefully, serving God and healing people. Yet instead of that, the thin expert in human souls, Cadfael, has to investigate all kinds of crimes again and again.
In the fifth volume of the “Chronicles,” Cadfael must solve a brutal murder that disrupts an unequal marriage. The key to the mystery seems to lie in the colony of lepers near the abbey. But the cause of the killing is not a disease of the body, but a perverted mind…