A Morbid Taste For Bones

A Morbid Taste For Bones

By Ellis Peters

A Welsh Benedictine monk living at Shrewsbury Abbey in western England, Brother Cadfael spends much of his time tending the herbs and vegetables in the garden—but now there’s a more pressing matter. Cadfael is to serve as translator for a group of monks heading to the town of Gwytherin in Wales. The team’s goal is to collect the holy remains of Saint Winifred, which Prior Robert hopes will boost the abbey’s reputation, as well as his own. But when the monks arrive in Gwytherin, the town is divided over the request.

When the leading opponent to disturbing the grave is found shot dead with a mysterious arrow, some believe Saint Winifred herself delivered the deadly blow. Brother Cadfael knows an earthly hand did the deed, but his plan to root out a murderer may dig up more than he can handle.

I don't know if this exactly qualifies as "set in a monastery, convent, abbey, etc" but it's got a lot of Benedictine monks, so we'll call it good.  Between this and Bitter Greens anyway, I think I did enough religious reading.  The mystery isn't incredibly mysterious, but I was intrigued by the cover-up (there's no way a Benedictine monk murders a man in an effort to take a saint's bones and it's NOT a huge deal without a massive cover-up, and how on earth do you cover it up in medieval Wales - that's what made me doubt the identity of the murderer so long).

My mother loves Brother Cadfael books, and this was an easy selection for me to make. It's just plain bad luck I read it in the middle of a couple of heavy hitters, and it suffers from comparison. There's nothing wrong with it, per se, just that there really isn't very much to it.  Cadfael and crew go up to Wales to dig up a saint's bones, there's some local opposition, the local opposition dies, two separate inappropriate romances are going on, temporarily adding action and confusing the matter, and eventually Cadfael realizes that one of the monks is particularly vainglorious and wants to make a famous name for himself, so they stage a saintervention and then kinda accidentally wind up having to kill him, and switch his body for the saints in the reliquary to hide it. It does sound like other books in the series get much further into Cadfael's backstory, which was more interesting than the plot or the characters in Morbid Taste.

Peters does that thing where the main character is the "moral" character, as clearly opposed to one or another adjacent character, and sets it up so that a newly introduced character, whose side we are also supposed to be on, bonds with the main character about how buffoonishly venal the "bad guy" is. I'm explaining it horribly, but trying to describe what it is about that trope that rubs me the wrong way so much.  I don't know, it just sets off a mean-girls vibe that winds up making me like the hero less and the villain more. Also, I had no love for the side romances in the story, to be perfectly frank, I kinda wished they would all break up.  I mean, this monk has been there a week and lets an accused murderer flee the scene and you're going to put him up in a cushy "jail" and then let him flee the scene too?  Because true love? That sounds like poor decision making.  But of course all these romantic sentimental decisions turn out to be the "right" thing to do.  BALDERDASH.  Let me just have  a nice murder without this treacly bullshit. A real taste for bones, as it were. 



50: A Book Set In An Abbey, Cloister, Monastery, Vicarage, Or Convent