Prioress Eleanor of Tyndal, her infirmarian aide Sister Anne, and Brother Thomas, a troubled monk, head for Wynethorpe Castle to help a dangerously ill child, but their task is complicated by the murder of an important guest.

Sylvia Townsend Warner's The Corner That Held Them is a historical novel like no other, one that immerses the reader in the dailiness of history, rather than history as the given sequence of events that, in time, it comes to seem. Time ebbs and flows and characters come and go in this novel, set in the era of the Black Death, about a Benedictine convent of no great note. The nuns do their chores, and seek to maintain and improve the fabric of their...

Still recovering from a near fatal winter fever, Prioress Eleanor of Tyndale travels to Amesbury Priory in May of 1272 to visit her aunt Beatrice, acting prioress. There she must solve the mystery of a vengeful "ghost" who is killing people.

The summer of 1276 at Tyndal Priory is passing peacefully until a villager's corpse is found floating in the millpond. A Jewish family, refugees under the 1275 Statute of the Jewry, is accused. Did Jacob ben Asser kill him or was it Gytha, the prioress' maid? Even Prioress Eleanor now wonders if she wants to unmask the killer.