Ellis Peters' A Morbid Taste for Bones, the first of her series of mysteries starring Brother Cadfael, a Benedictine monk in England (though Cadfael is Welsh) in the 12th century. I last read this in 1993, so I truly didn't remember much about the story at all -- who it was that was killed, who did it, even large swathes of the plot. The one thing I did remember, vaguely, was the climax of the book, but I didn't realize it was the climax until I got to it.
The Abbey in Shrewsbury sends a mission into Wales to recover the bones of St. Winifred, a minor saint. (She was beheaded by a man who wanted to take her virginity, another Saint, Beuno, came along and reattached her head, she returned to life, and she caused the man who beheaded her to melt away into water. She then became the leader of a convent and died a virgin. This is a real saint, and this is her real story.) The locals are opposed to a bunch of English monks taking Winifred's bones away, one local landowner who was most vocal in his opposition is murdered, and the English lover of the man's daughter is suspected. Cadfael, part of the crew sent to Wales because he's bilingual, suspects that someone else did it. but who? As a mystery, it's adequate; there's a good twenty characters in this book, and the plausible suspects you can count on less than a single hand. The plot's straightforward, the ending is a little cryptic (Peters never spells out what happened, she just drops lots of hints), and the prose is fairly dense. I enjoyed reading it, or rather, rereading it -- it's frequently funny -- but later books in the series, IIRC, are better plotted and better mysteries. This was, I believe, intended as a one-off, not as the launch of a series.
