Getting into Bad Habits!

After a very slow month reading-wise, I've finally finished 'One Corpse Too Many' by Ellis Peters, the second in the twenty-strong series of novels featuring medieval detective Brother Cadfael.

In this outing, the Abbey of St Peter and St Paul is caught up in King Stephen's 1138 siege of Shrewsbury.  After the town falls and the King has taken his executed the castle's defenders, Brother Cadfael is called upon to help give them some dignity in death.  But when he counts the number of bodies, he realises there is something amiss - he has one corpse too many.  Although the King gives him permission to find who murdered the unexpected cadaver, it's a race against time to do justice before the armies move on...

'One Corpse Too Many'
by Ellis Peters (Sphere, 2010)

This book really shouldn't have taken me three weeks to read.  It's only 282 pages long for crying out loud!  But I think a combination of lots of other things going on generally and the fact that I've read some of the later novels already didn't help.  It was hard to get a sense of urgency and peril when I knew what happened to certain characters in later books.  In retrospect, I rather regret reading them in such an eclectic order.

While on the subject of the other novels, I would definitely recommend 'Monks Hood' (book 3), 'A Morbid Taste for Bones' (Book 1) and 'Brother Cadfael's Penance (book 20).  I've not read all the books in between, but I'm definitely going to work through them in order from now on!

If I hadn't known what I did, I would have enjoyed this book very much.  It's a good plot yet relatively simple and, as always, Ellis Peters creates a wonderful sense of time and place.  I've always loved that element of the books, it's somehow escapist despite the crime and violence!  The only criticism I have is that the big 'love in' towards the end felt a bit sudden and over the top after the rest of the book, which was a shame.  I guess Peters was just an old romantic at heart.  It's a funny old world.