The Leper of Saint Giles

In this mystery in the award-winning series featuring a twelfth-century Benedictine monk, Brother Cadfael must travel to the heart of a leper colony to root out the secret behind 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.
 
When he sees the fragile bride looking like a prisoner between her two stern guardians and the bridegroom—an arrogant, fleshy aristocrat old enough to be her grandfather—he quickly discerns this union may be more damned than blessed. Indeed, a savage murder will interrupt the May–December marriage and leave Cadfael with a dark, terrible mystery to solve. Now, with the key to the killing hidden among the lepers of Saint Giles, the monk must ferret out a sickness not of the body, but of a twisted soul.
 

Ellis Peters is a pseudonym of Edith Mary Pargeter (1913–1995), a British author whose Chronicles of Brother Cadfael are credited with popularizing the historical mystery. Cadfael, a Welsh Benedictine monk living at Shrewsbury Abbey in the first half of the twelfth century, has been described as combining the curious mind of a scientist with the bravery of a knight-errant. The character has been adapted for television, and the books drew international attention to Shrewsbury and its history.
 
Pargeter won an Edgar Award in 1963 for Death and the Joyful Woman, and in 1993 she won the Cartier Diamond Dagger, an annual award given by the Crime Writers’ Association of Great Britain. She was appointed officer of the Order of the British Empire in 1994, and in 1999 the British Crime Writers’ Association established the Ellis Peters Historical Dagger award, later called the Ellis Peters Historical Award.