The year is 1143 and this is the seventeenth chronicle of Brother Cadfael, of the Benedictine Abbey of Saint Peter and Saint Paul at Shrewbury. Once again, the gentle monk is forced to leave the tranquility of his herb garden and use his knowledge of human nature to solve a murder—this one frighteningly close to home. When a newly plowed field given to the Benedictine Abbey of Saint Peter and Saint Paul yields the body of a young woman, Brother Cadfael finds himself in a delicate situation. The field was once owned by a local potter named Ruald, who has abandoned his beautiful wife Generys to take monastic vows. Generys was said to have gone away with a lover, but now it seems that she has been murdered. With the arrival at the Abbey of young Sulien Blaunt, a novice fleeing homeward from the civil war raging in East Anglia, the mysteries surrounding the corpse start to multiply.
