Book cover No. 3 I'm going through these books approximately in the order I came across them. This is the first of the Brother Cadfael novels I read and I subsequently bought them all as they came out in paperback. I'm not normally a fan of historical novels, but the murder mystery plus the ongoing stories of the recurring characters had me hooked.
It's another book that influenced my writing too. There may have been earlier examples of "genre + murder mystery", but I think Ellis Peters was the first to become really popular and she gave me the idea of doing a fantasy murder mystery where magic was important in both the committing and the solving of the crime. That was the novel I almost sold.
