From Publishers Weekly
Peter's 17th mystery featuring Brother Cadfael finds the 12th-century monk at his most sober and reflective, but his detecting talents are as dazzling as ever. When a newly tilled field recently given to the Benedictine abbey yields the hastily buried body of a young woman, Brother Cadfael takes a keen and immediate interest in the situation. Ruald, the former tenant of the land, entered the abbey as a novice a year earlier, abandoning his beautiful, young and extremely resentful wife, Generys. She has since mysteriously disappeared. Though it seems likely that the body is hers, Ruald is quickly cleared of suspicion via an unlikely source. Sulien Blount, a monk fleeing homeward from the devastating civil war near his own abbey, has solid proof that Generys was recently seen alive. When a second suspect, an itinerant peddlar, is arrested in connection with the murder, Sulien is again able to clear him. Brother Cadfael, deeply troubled, feels that Sulien knows much more than he is saying. An unusual air of melancholy pervades this novel as war, illness and human frailties take their tolls on the weary citizens of Shrewsbury. Created with Peters's consummate skill, Brother Cadfael's world is here seen through a darker glass.
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Review
The Potter's Field is the seventeenth mystery chronicle of Brother Cadfael, the gentle and gracefully aging confidant of the Abbot, who carefully balances his religious duties with the often more satisfying work of solving mysteries. Set in England in 1143, the tale commences when the abbey ploughman finds, "lying along the furrow for almost the length of a man's forearm, black and wavy and fine, a long, thick tress of dark hair" on a newly-traded piece of land. The plowing stops, a body - now only bones - is uncovered. From the hair, they know it is a woman. But who? And why was she buried with care - her hands carefully arranged to hold a cross made of sticks - but without consecration? Brother Rauld, who only recently took his final monastic vows, owned the field for many years before he abandoned it - and his wife - for his calling. His wife then disappeared without a trace shortly after he entered the monastery. Can there be any doubt about who the dead woman is? Or who killed her? Yes, there certainly can be, and there is. With delicately drawn beauty and an infinitely patient portrayal of a time, a place, and a populace, Brother Cadfael's tenderly shrewd investigative methods shine an intriguingly feminine light on the end of a period of history usually called dark. -- For great reviews of books for girls, check out. -- From