Dead Man’s Ransom, by Ellis Peters

The ninth book in the Brother Cadfael series [1], this particular book trods on fairly familiar ground, but immensely satisfying and with some twists. For example, like some of the other books, this novel finds Cadfael dealing with a Welsh context to a complicated murder, political, and romantic mystery. Sheriff Prescote of Shrewsbury leads the local contingent of soldiers to battle at Lincoln, only to find himself captured by some renegate Welsh, one of whom is a carefree lordling that is captured in a bungled attack on a convent and becomes a convenient prisoner to exchange for the sheriff. It so happens that the lordling is engaged to a young woman he doesn’t love, and while serving his time as a hostage he falls in love with the sheriff’s neglected daughter, while his best friend is eaten up with obsessive love for his own unwanted fiance. What follows is a complicated and tangled but richly nuanced tale of honor and loyalty and surprising mercy and judgment.

In seeing Cadfael’s excessive curiosity, his penchant for being a matchmaker for young people in deeply complicated romantic drama, in his being a person who makes far too few concessions to his age in acting like a much younger man than he is, and in being a person who is always an outsider and whose identity is immensely complicated, one appreciates a great deal of skill on the part of the author in crafting a story that blends mystery, history, and romance in satisfying ways. For all of Cadfael’s agreement with certain aspects of Welsh ways, like the acceptance of acknowledged illegitimate children without shame for their parents’ sins, degrees of guilt and a preference for mercy rather than condemnation in judgment, Cadfael resides in England because he is too cosmopolitan to fit in as a commoner in Wales.

Although little of the drama here, nor the curious way in which Cadfael untangles the threads of this mystery, is particularly unusual, this novel is full of dramatic incident and compelling character studies. In particular, the women of this novel are drawn with great skill, their agency in seeking to choose their own fates within the constraints of their times and their cultural and class context remarkable and positive in that the aims of the men and women of this novel, for all their complexities, ultimately coincide. It is seeing the reality of mischance and bungling and error and the chaos and anarchy of human affairs and also see an authorial providence that brings people together in love, grants wisdom to those who need it, and allows the reader to feel hope that with a generous author and skillful management of our affairs as best as we are able we may yet find happiness for ourselves, at the end of all our perils.

[1] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2015/02/26/book-review-the-devils-novice/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2015/02/25/book-review-the-sanctuary-sparrow/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2015/02/24/book-review-the-virgin-in-the-ice/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2015/02/13/book-review-the-leper-of-st-giles/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2015/02/11/book-review-st-peters-fair/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2015/02/10/book-review-monks-hood/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2015/01/31/book-review-one-corpse-too-many/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2015/01/31/book-review-a-morbid-taste-for-bones/