The Potter's Field — Ellis Peters

The year is 1143 and this is the seventeenth chronicle of Brother Cadfael, of the Benedictine Abbey of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, at Shrewsbury. Once again, the gentle monk is forced to leave the tranquility of his herb garden and use his knowledge of human nature to solve a murder -- this one frighteningly close to home.

When a newly plowed field recently given to the Benedictine Abbey of Saint Peter and Saint Paul yields the body of a young woman, Brother Cadfael is quickly thrown into a delicate situation. The field was once owned by a local potter named Ruald who had abandoned his beautiful wife Generys to take monastic vows.

Generys was said to have gone away with a lover, but now it seems as if she had been murdered. With the arrival at the Abbey of young Sulien Blount, a novice fleeing homeward from the civil war raging in East Anglia, the mysteries surrounding the corpse start to multiply.