{"id":606,"date":"2018-07-03T09:31:39","date_gmt":"2018-07-03T08:31:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.hebulstrode.co.uk\/?p=606"},"modified":"2018-07-04T07:55:10","modified_gmt":"2018-07-04T06:55:10","slug":"review-of-monks-hood-by-ellis-peters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.hebulstrode.co.uk\/?p=606","title":{"rendered":"Review of ‘Monk’s Hood’ by Ellis Peters"},"content":{"rendered":"

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The edition of the book that I read, dating from 1990 (ten years after its initial publication), is riddled with typos, with the first one being displayed on the cover: Monks Hood<\/em> rather than Monk\u2019s Hood.<\/em>\u00a0 Still, despite these minor niggles, the story told by Peters is engaging enough, with Brother Cadfael emerging as a sympathetic and highly unconventional sleuth, for I must own to not knowing of any other twelfth-century Benedictine herbalist protagonist fulfilling such a role. The period detail was very well done, but I found the prose a little lumpy in places. It was well plotted with plenty of potential suspects to divert the attention of the reader, but following the \u2018Chekhov\u2019s Gun\u2019 rule I sensed that the appearance of a certain character very early in the story, and his subsequent absence until the latter stages of the book, pointed to him being the culprit. Was he? Well, if you want to find out for sure, you should read it yourself. <\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

All in all Peters needed a better editor for this book, but for all I know the issues that I have enumerated may well have been addressed in later editions. <\/span><\/p>\n

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