The Rose Rent is the thirteenth of Ellis Peters’ Brother Cadfael novels, a quiet non-civil war story about a widow who’s gifted the house of her marriage to the abbey, in return for one rose a year from a bush on the property. A few days before the rent is due, a dead body is found near the hacked-at bush; and shortly thereafter, the widow herself disappears.
The motives here are a little thin, but it’s vaguely amusing to have a mystery turn around the legal issue of a revocable gift. A leisurely and harmless way to pass a lunch time, though it would make me happy if there would be a Cadfael novel that didn’t end with a romantic pairing-off, because really, how many True Loves in potentia can there be out there, just waiting for a murder and Cadfael to bring them together?
It’s a long time since I read any Cadfael books, and this is part of the reason: they all have the same plot, plus, the romance undermines the mystery element, since you always know that neither of the nice young couple is the murderer.
And Cadfaels benign attitude towards young love is (sometimes, if not always) pretty anachronistic
Jean: I have a hunch that Cadfael and his forensics might be pretty anachronistic too, though that’s just a guess. Yes, they are predictable, but they’re pretty good books for when I just need something to read.
Kate and Jean:
I’m afraid pretty much everything in Cadfael’s internal monologue is anachronistic. I enjoyed nearly all of the books, and some of them very much indeed, but there simply were not any people alive in England with attitudes like that in the 12th century. Nor would they have survived long, had there been. Some of the herb-lore is probably accurate to the period, but the approach to the idea of ‘evidence’, and cause-and-effect, and psychology, is centuries too early.
I think of these books as a kind of science fiction—putting modern or nearly-modern ideas in an alien context, in order to highlight aspects that aren’t always obvious to those of us immersed in them. Peters does a pretty good job of portraying the basic motivations that aren’t common today, but she doesn’t even try to get inside an actual 12th century mindset, except in occasional caricatures (mostly in the villains).