The Confession of Brother Haluin (Brother Cadfael #15) ★★☆☆ ½

~ Bookstooge

haluin (Custom)

This review is written with a GPL 4.0 license and the rights contained therein shall supersede all TOS by any and all websites in regards to copying and sharing without proper authorization and permissions. Crossposted at WordPress, Blogspot, Librarything & Tumblr by Bookstooge’s Exalted Permission
Title: The Confession of Brother Haluin
Series: Brother Cadfael #15
Author: Ellis Peters
Rating: 2.5 of 5 Stars
Genre: Mystery
Pages: 208
Format: Digital Edition

 

Synopsis:

Brother Haluin almost dies and confesses to the head Priest and Cadfael. He had an encounter of the flesh with a young woman, who he got with child 18 years ago. Haluin gave the mother herbs from Cadfael’s herbariam to end the pregnancy but the mother told Haluin that it ended up killing the mother along with the child. And that was when Haluin entered the abbey, in despair.

He ends up surviving his ordeal, he gives himself the penance of walking to the dead woman’s tomb and keeping vigil for a night. Haluin’s feet being crippled due to the ordeal, Cadfael is tasked with helping him keep his vow.

In a string of coincidences that can only happen in a murder mystery, we find out that Haluin was lied to by the mother and that the young woman was married off and the child raised as that other man’s. Said young woman is now a nun as old as Haluin. Their daughter has love issues all of her own which are neatly resolved when it is revealed that she is NOT the blood daughter of the Old Duke. An old lady servant is killed by the nun’s mother to keep everything secret. Because the old mother did all of this because she wanted the young man back in the day and he wouldn’t commit adultery with her, as she was married. So she starts this whole chain of events.

Everyone except the old mother ends up being reasonably satisfied with how things turn out and Brother Haluin and Cadfael return to their abbey.

 

My Thoughts:

This was a typical Brother Cadfael mystery. He’s just an observer like he has been in the last several and has very little to do with the actual story. So that’s where I’d normally give this a 3star rating. But this time around a lot of the story is driven by ideas of absolution and atoning for you own sins, ie, working to get your sins forgiven. Haluin makes it a point that if he can’t fulfill his vow, he won’t be forgiven. And it is stated outright that he doesn’t feel like he’ll be forgiven if he doesn’t DO some sort of very hard penance.

Normally the catholic practices and theology are kept in the background of these books. This time around though, they played a much bigger part and cut right across everything the Bible actually says about forgiveness of sins. When I hear about earning forgiveness for your sins, well, that just sets my staunch Protestant soul ablaze. I won’t go into the details, as this is not a theology post. But it really took this book down a peg for me. I’ve actually been surprised this hasn’t happened before.

I’ve got 5 or 6 more Brother Cadfael books to go and I’m really hoping I can stick it out to the end. But to be honest, these are getting boring; that’s almost as bad as un-Biblical theology in my mind!

★★☆☆ ½

bookstooge

 

  1. The Hermit of Eyton Forest (Book 14)
  2. The Rose Rent (Book 13)
  3. Raven in the Foregate (Book 12)
  4. An Excellent Mystery (Book 11)
  5. The Pilgrim of Hate (Book 10)

 

21 thoughts on “The Confession of Brother Haluin (Brother Cadfael #15) ★★☆☆ ½”

      1. I am an avid fan of Sansom and his hunchbacked lawyer protagonist, Matthew Shardlake. Sansom’s characters live in three dimensional sharpness. His understanding of the times and thought of the era seem precise and ring true taking what I know into account.

        I remember reading Cadfael years ago. I looked on the books as being as comfy as warm slippers (with a good bloody murder usually throw in).

        Liked by 1 person

        Reply

    1. I quit most series when they stop being interesting too. But right now this is my only “mystery” genre series and I like a little variety mixed in with my SFF reading.
      Kind of like eating my vegetables 😀

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply

  4. Ooo, yeh, when I saw the 2 stars my first thought was that they’re getting worse. Or is it also that it’s too much of a good thing, in that the first time you have ice cream, it’s wonderful but the 50th day in a row of having ice cream, you’d probably be sick of it? Did that make sense? If not, it’s par for the course lately with me. Ha ha!

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

    1. I know exactly what you mean. To go with your food analogy, I’d say it is like when you are really hungry everything or anything tastes really good. But once you are no longer starving, you get a bit pickier with what you want to eat.

      Like

      Reply

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Cancel

Connecting to %s