Ellis Peters

Ellis Peters was the principal pen name of Edith Pargeter, a prolific British author best known for the Chronicles of Brother Cadfael, a series of historical mysteries set in a twelfth-century Benedictine abbey in Shrewsbury, England, and featuring a Welsh monk who came to the cloister after a worldly life as a soldier and Crusader. Beginning with A Morbid Taste for Bones in 1977, the series was instrumental in popularizing medieval historical mystery as a genre and was adapted into the long-running ITV television series Cadfael, starring Derek Jacobi.

Pargeter wrote under several names across a career spanning decades, including well-regarded historical and contemporary fiction as Edith Pargeter, but it is as Ellis Peters and through Cadfael's gentle, humane investigations — solved as much through observation of character and compassion as deduction — that she is best remembered. The series is notable for its detailed, well-researched depiction of monastic life and medieval England, and for a detective whose worldly past experience of violence and love informs a distinctly forgiving approach to justice. New readers should start with A Morbid Taste for Bones, since the series proceeds in a loose chronological order across Cadfael's later life. Peters died in 1995; the Cadfael series remains complete at twenty novels and a collection of short stories.