The Monastery Murders

Christmas Eve, 1176. Brother Cuthbert fails to ring the night-prayer bell at Fairmore Abbey and is discovered brutally murdered. Aelred Barling and Hugo Stanton are summoned from London to the monastery on the Yorkshire Moors, where the rule of silence and the apparent enclosure of the community should restrict both the suspect list and the killer’s opportunity to escape.

Instead, the investigators find a house divided by old grievances, ambition and resentment. Additional deaths reveal a deliberate pattern, but each monk understands the abbey’s secrets differently and several have reasons to conceal what they know. Barling and Stanton must distinguish spiritual discipline from calculated performance before the murderer completes a sequence whose logic places the investigators themselves at risk.