Ellis Peters is famous throughout the world as the author of the Chronicles of Brother Cadfael, featuring her monastic medieval sleuth. Televised, adapted for radio, transformed in to talking books, the Cadfael novels have played a major role in turning crime writing into a literary genre. But there is more to Peters than her twenty Cadfael novels. As Ellis Peter she has also produced a series of fourteen Inspector Felse novels, while under her real name of Edith Pargeter she has written a further thrity-six novels. These include two outstanding historical sequences, The Brothers of Gwynedd quartet, and The Heaven Tree trilogy, and The Eighth Champion of Christendom, a trilogy of novels about the Second World War written during and just after the conflict. Add three collections of stories, three works of non-fiction and sixteen translations of Czech literature and Pargeter’s canon of high quality writing is finally completed. In this book, the first on Edith Pargeter, Margaret Lewis proves an admirable and incisive guide to the two faces of this prolific and award-winning popular author, exploring bother her life and her work.