A Morbid Taste for Bones

⚖The case for it

Cadfael came to the cloister late, after crusading and a life at sea, and that worldliness is why he reads people better than the career monks around him. A Shrewsbury delegation goes into Wales to collect a saint’s bones the locals would rather keep, a relic dispute that actually happened. Prior Robert’s ambition gets shown through his own mouth rather than announced. The tone is dry and quietly sarcastic about church politics, and the murder arrives without gore. Readers report being “fully engaged within two paragraphs,” and quote lines like “saints, as common as mushrooms in autumn.”

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

It “takes an age to get going,” with the murder held back well past where readers expect it and the early chapters given over to an argument rather than momentum. Most work the answer out long before Cadfael does. Outside him the cast is thin enough that one reader describes the book as “shallow, hollow, like a man alone in a world of puppets.” The romance reads as “manipulative and repetitive.” Cadfael mostly spends the book “setting traps that don’t work.” One reader compares the whole to “drinking lite beer.”

— the honest librarian

4h

honest hours

6

sittings