A Morbid Taste for Bones

⚖The case for it

Series mysteries stand on their company, not their puzzles, and this puzzle is thin: I named the culprit while Cadfael was still gathering his herbs, and he reasons like someone who peeked at Conan Doyle six centuries early. Stay for the monk anyway. Before the cloister he soldiered and sailed, and he carries that worn patience into every conversation. Peters did her homework, so the plants and the border quarrels feel weighed and real. Start where the whole gentle-historical line first drew breath.

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

Cadfael is a twentieth-century liberal in a twelfth-century habit: forensically minded, ecumenically tolerant, suspiciously untroubled by the actual medieval church. The mystery itself is slender, the culprit visible from a distance, and Peters's Wales is scrubbed clean of real menace. Cozy is the genre promise; just know the Middle Ages here come with the temperature pre-warmed.

— the honest librarian