A reluctant and high 2.5 stars. I love the Cadfael series, but this isn't Ellis Peters's best. The reader figures out way too early what's really going on, while Cadfael spends endless pages wondering why this character or that looks so gosh darn familiar. The murder, as happens sometimes with Peters, is secondary and almost unnecessary to the central plot, and just as predictably and easily solved as the real mystery. The story takes excessively long to get on its feet. (Pun unintended, sorry Brother Haluin.) And, the real reason I bumped it down to two instead of three stars, the whole of it takes places outside of familiar Shrewsbury and the Abbey of St. Peter and St. Paul, almost entirely among new characters who are much less real, developed, or interesting than the denizens of Cadfael's home. Haluin isn't interesting enough to hold up a whole book, the women run to tropes - well, Ellis Peters only has about three kinds of women - and no other characters exist enough to make up for the lack of those we know and love from the rest of the series. Cadfael doesn't even get to do any real detecting! At most he points out that the presence of snow indicates the relative time of death, and then admits Cenred could have figured that out too.

Peters's usual lovely prose, but the plot is weak.