Review: One Corpse Too Many by Ellis Peters

by Chriss Cornish published: May 15, 2010 No Comments

O is for One Corpse Too Many

This Book Is About

In the summer of 1138, war between King Stephen and the Empress Maud takes Brother Cadfael from the quiet world of his garden into a battlefield of passions, deceptions, and death. Not far from the safety of the abbey walls, Shrewsbury Castle falls, leaving its ninety-four defenders, loyal to the Empress, to hang as traitors. With a heavy heart, Brother Cadfael agrees to bury the dead, only to make a grisly discover: ninety-five dead bodies lie in a row – the extra victim has been cruelly strangled, not hanged. But one death among so many seems unimportant to all but the good Benedictine. He vows to find the truth behind disparate clues: a girl in boy’s clothing, a missing treasure, and a single broken flower…

My Thoughts On This Book

Once Corpse Too Many is the second book in the Brother Cadfael series and one of my favorites; I’ve re-read it more times than I can count. You’ve got war, a murder, treason, missing treasure, and young lovers in peril all in Ellis Peters’ wonderful, quickly paced prose.

I’m a big Ellis Peters fan, as you may be able to tell from the number of her works that appear on the lists for the ABC of Historical Fiction I started this May. But what makes One Corpse Too Many so appealing to me that I would label it a favorite among favorites?

I think it’s because of the wonderful play of people in this book. There are so many characters but they’re all so beautifully rendered and interesting; none of them are one sided and they all seem to have their little secrets. There’s also a delightful suspense and mischief you get from this first encounter between Brother Cadfael and his future opponent/ally Hugh Beringar.

For those of you unfamiliar with the Brother Cadfael series, Ellis Peters is the pen name of Edith Pargeter; a historical fiction author and scholar on Welsh and medieval history who has been honored for translating several Czech classics. The Cadfael series is centered at the real Abbey of Saint Peter and Saint Paul in the real free town of Shrewsbury, England, near the Welsh border. Brother Cadfael is a fictitious Benedictine monk and Welshman who had been both a soldier during the crusades and a sailor before settling down, in his 60s, for a quite life as a Brother and herbalist at the Abbey of Saints Peter and Paul.

The Abbot, the Prior, the King, and the Sheriff in Once Corpse Too Many were all real people, but everyone else are inventions of the author’s fancy.

The series is set in the 1100s, during the English Civil War. The one were Empress Maud and her cousin King Stephan were contending for the throne of England, not the rebellion of Cromwell, for those of you who, like me, are never quite sure which of their internal wars the British are talking about when they say “The Civil War”.