Ellis Peters

Civil war over England's throne leaves a legacy of violence, and the murder of a knight....

Christmas, 1141 A.D. 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...

This is the eleventh chronicle of Brother Cadfael, of the Benedictine Abbey of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, at Shrewsbury....

King Stephen's bloody siege against the town of Shrewsbury has reduced many of its stores and homes to rubble....

The day after a Gothic door is returned to its original place in the Mottisham village church, two men are found dead....

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?...

Heresy, murder, and the contents of a mysterious treasure chest challenge Brother Cadfael—12th-century herbalist, sleuth, and sometime cupid—in his 16th chronicle....

The year is 1142, and all England is in the iron grip of civil war.....

Outside the pale of the Abbey of Saint Peters and Saint Paul, in September of the year of our Lord 1140, a priestly emissary for King Stephen has been reported missing...

When a fatal draught of Monk's Hood turns up in the dinner plate of a guest at the Shrewsbury abbey, fingers point at half a dozen likely suspects, including an abashed and bewildered Cadfael.....

It is early in the twelfth century, and the civil war between King Stephen and the Empress Maud rages with renewed vigor....

A late spring in 1142 has the Abbey monks dismayed, for there may be no roses by June 22nd....

Helmut Schauffler, a young Nazi working in the small English village of Comerford, sets out to play upon the post-war sensibilities and fears by terrorizing his new neighbors...

Cadfael's return to his Welsh homeland for a visit proves a rather discomfiting homecoming when an honorable nobleman turns up in a patch of forest with an arrow embedded in his chest....

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....

Civil war continues to blaze in the autumn of 1139. Amid the uncertainty and peril of the moment two noble children make their escape, headed for Shrewsbury. But for reasons no one knows, the young fugitives never reach their destination...

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...

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...

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...

While Brother Cadfael has bent Abbey rules, he has never broken his monastic vows—until now. Word has come to Shrewsbury of a treacherous act that has left 30 of Empress Maud's knights imprisoned during England's dynastic war between two grandchildren of William the Conqueror.