Ellis Peters

The year is 1142, and England is in the grip of civil war. Within the cloisters of the Benedictine Abbey of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, there begins a chain of events no less momentous than the upheavals of the outside world. It starts with the sad demise of Richard Ludel, Lord of Eyton, whose ten-year-old son and heir, also named Richard, is a pupil at the abbey. The boy refuses to surrender his newly inherited powers to Dionysia, his furious, formidable...

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...

The sixteenth chronicle of Brother Cadfael. Brother Cadfael must find a rebuttal for charges of heresy and solve a murder.

Detective Inspector George Felse is called upon to investigate the disappearance of two members of a musical gathering Singers and musicians are gathered for a weekend course in folk music at the impressive neo-Gothic country mansion Follymead. Most come only to sing or to listen, but one or two have nonmusical scores to settle. When brilliantly talented Liri Palmer sings "Black, black, black is the colour of my true-love's heart," she clearly has...

When an obnoxious Nazi landworker is murdered in the small village of Comerford, Sergeant George Felse faces one of the toughest investigations of his career It is 1952, and the shadow of World War II still lies over the green fields of the small village of Comerford on the Welsh borders. When ex-prisoner of war Helmut Schauffler is murdered, local policeman Sergeant George Felse has his work cut out: Schauffler was Nazi to the core and the majority...

When the late-Gothic, oak door is returned to its rightful place at Mottisham village church, there is a body to go with it A news photographer is found dead at the threshold of the church of Saint Eata, his hand extended to the door's great cast-iron knocker. Surely it is not a coincidence when a second victim is discovered in eerily similar circumstances? Legend holds that sinners who seize the knocker have their hands burned by the cold iron, but...

When Maggie Tressider awakes after a car crash convinced she has committed murder, private investigator Francis Killian, along with George and Bunty Felse, attempts to unearth the secrets of Maggie's past World-famous opera singer Maggie Tressider wakes up in a hospital after an accident, haunted by the certainty that she has committed a murder. Her doctor suggests that, with the help of a psychiatrist, she may be able to lay the nameless specter...

Detective Inspector George Felse investigates a death and a disappearance both linked to mystery whose roots go back to ancient Roman times When archaeologist Alan Morris disappears in Turkey, his great-niece, Charlotte, regrets never having gotten to know him better. In an attempt to better understand him, Charlotte begins reading the books he wrote. One of them leads her to visit the Roman site of Aurae Phiala on the Welsh border-the last place...

In the summer of 1139, there is a pause in the civil war racking the country. St. Peter's Fair attracts merchants from across England and beyond, promising to bring some much-needed gaiety to Shrewsbury - that is, until the dead body of a wealthy merchant is found in the river Severn. Brother Cadfael offers to help the merchant's lovely niece uncover the murderer, but as he searches for the killer, the merchant's wares are ransacked, and two more...

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...