No outsiders are ever admitted to the monastery of Saint-Gilbert-Entre-les-Loups, hidden deep in the wilderness of Quebec, where two dozen cloistered monks live in peace and prayer. They grow vegetables, they tend chickens, they make chocolate. And they sing. Ironically, for a community that has taken a vow of silence, the monks have become world famous for their glorious voices, raised in ancient chants whose effect on both singer and listener is...

"In the year of our Lord 1141, civil war over England's throne leaves a legacy of violence- and the murder of a knight dear to Brother Cadfael. And with gentle budstrewn May, a flood of pilgrims comes to the celebration of Saint Winifred at the Abbey of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, carrying with it many strange souls and perhaps the knight's killer. Brother Cadfael's shrewd eyes see all: the prosperous merchant who rings false, and angelic lame boy,...

Brother Cadfael must travel to the heart of a leper colony to root out the secret to a savage murder. Setting out for the Saint Giles leper colony outside Shrewsbury, Brother Cadfael has more pressing matters on his mind than the grand wedding coming to his abbey. But as fate would have it, Cadfael arrives at Saint Giles just as the nuptial party passes the colony's gates. He sees the fragile bride looking like a prisoner between her two stern guardians...

“Bodies and red herrings pile up in a satisfying way” in the Silver Dagger Award–winning medieval mystery series starring Brother Cadfael (Library Journal).
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...

An anonymous letter sent to Larkwoods Prior accuses Peter Henderson, an academic celebrity renowned for daring ideas, of a grotesque murder: the calculated killing of Jenny, his disabled partner, believed by everyone to have died peacefully two years previously from a sudden attack of cancer. But for this letter there is no evidence, no suspect and no crime.

"A collection of three stories of 12th-century monastic life including a Christmas story, a tale of robbery and attempted murder, and a narrative of Brother Cadfael's early years."--

What will a group of monks do when their two-century-old monastery in New York City is threatened with demolition to make a room for a new high-rise? Anything they have to. "Thou Shalt Not Steal" is only the first of the Commandments to be broken as the saintly face off against the unscrupulous over that most sacred of relics, a Park Avenue address. Returning to bookstores for the first time in three decades, Brothers Keepers offers not only a master...

Late December, 1389. Ordered to undertake a gruelling three-day journey to bleak Whitby Abbey in the far north of England in a bid to purchase the Abbey's priceless Holy Relic - a lock of St Hild's hair, said to be 700 years old - Hildegard of Meaux and her three companion monks arrive to find the Abbey a decidedly unwelcoming place, a place of strange customs and practices very different to their modest lifestyle at Meaux. Nor, as Hildegard discovers,...

In February of 1141, men march home from war to Shrewsbury, but the captured sheriff Gilbert Prestcote is not among them. Elis, a young Welsh prisoner, is delivered to the Abbey of Saint Peter and Saint Paul to begin a tale that will test Brother Cadfael’s sense of justice—and his heart. By good fortune, it seems, the prisoner can be exchanged as Sheriff Prestcote’s ransom. What no one expects is that good-natured Elis will be struck down by...

"In 1349, Oswald, the third son of the de Lacy family, was an eighteen-year-old novice monk at Kintham Abbey. Sent to collect herbs from the forest, Oswald comes across a terrified village girl. Frenzied with fear, she runs headlong into a swollen river. Oswald pulls her broken and bruised body from the water and returns her to the local village, only to discover that several other women have disappeared. A heinous killer is at work, but because all...