Carole Fletcher wrote one sentence about the reading on this audiobook, and it turns out to be the single line in the entire review column that touches the performance at all. Excellent, the entry begins. The reading of the book was clear and made it alive. Every other response under St. Peter's Fair is about Ellis Peters, about Brother Cadfael, about whether you have remembered to buy the unabridged version. One line out of five, and it happens to be the useful one, because the credit attached to this page is in worse shape than the recording underneath it.
Copy-Paste Errors Riddle This Listing's Fields
The narrator slot reads Johanna Ward, followed by a closing square bracket left in place. Look at the first line of the description and you can see where that bracket came from: the blurb opens with the reading credit wrapped in brackets, and whoever assembled this page cut the name out and left half the punctuation attached to it. Small thing, easily fixed, never fixed. It also indicates how much hand-checking the rest of this entry got, and several fields further down turn out to have needed a good deal more.
Underneath the audio fields sit a thirteen-digit ISBN and a page count of one. An invisible formatting mark, the kind that survives a copy and paste out of a product listing, sits in front of Blackstone Audio in the publisher slot and in front of the word English in the language slot. None of that describes a recording. It describes a print entry that was merged into an audio one, and it explains why a page count of one occupies the space where a disc count or a runtime would actually help a buyer.
That leaves the numbers, which behave themselves. Ten votes produced a 4.8, so the column has to add up to exactly forty-eight points out of a possible fifty: two stars short of a clean sweep, distributed somewhere across those ten people. Five of the ten also wrote something. Two graded at four stars, and one of the two, signed Joyce, justified the grade in three words. It is ok. That constitutes the entire recorded dissent, thin material for weighing a purchase against.
Sophia Rose Explains the Charter Dispute Better
Shrewsbury in the summer of 1139 is having a decent year by the standards of a civil war, which is to say the fighting has paused long enough for the abbey to hold its annual fair. Merchants arrive from across England and beyond. The town wants a larger cut of the proceeds to pay for the wear its walls and streets took during the recent siege, the new abbot points at the original charter, and that argument is still running when a wealthy merchant turns up dead in the river Severn.
Sophia Rose supplies most of that context, not the publisher copy. The five-star entry lays out the charter dispute, names King Stephen and Empress Maud as the parties whose siege did the damage, watches the arriving traders get harassed by the youth of the town, and then stops mid-clause at the words the Abbot put. What came next is gone. What survives is still the most informative writing available here, and it was posted in July 2025 for a recording that has been on sale since July 2012.
By the time the second and third bodies appear, the pattern is money: like the merchant, both men were killed for the valuables they had on them. Cadfael takes on the dead man's niece, Emma, as a responsibility while he hunts the killer, and the pressure in the plot comes from the war more than from the murders, since betrayal in 1139 arrives from any direction and good intentions get people killed. The listing gives the length in its own abbreviations, 7 hrs and 52 mins, which suits that shape of story.
Nobody Says Whether This Edition Is Unabridged
One of the five responses reads like shopping advice more than a verdict on a book. Be sure you get unabridged books, wanderlust writes, adding that many characters return from one title to the next and the bad guys do not. Fair warning. This listing never answers it. No field says unabridged, no field says abridged, the description raises neither word, and so the one concrete piece of buying guidance in the column is guidance the page itself cannot help you act on.
Nothing in the record places the book in a sequence, either. The series name slot is empty and the position slot beside it is empty too, while the reviews treat the sequence as the entire point. This latest Cadfael mystery, one entry calls it. Brother cadfael series, says the heading on another. Many of the characters return from one book to another, says its body. A listener looking for the right place to start gets no help from the metadata and none from the description.
Almost twelve years separate the oldest response from the newest, December 2013 at one end and November 2025 at the other, and the register barely shifts across the gap. Jackyt files five stars and a line about not being able to beat Ellis Peters and Cadfael. Joyce files four stars and three words. Neither says anything about the audio, so if the reading is what you are trying to judge, one sentence from Carole Fletcher is all the material that exists.
Ward's Reading Rests on One Lonely Sentence
Cadfael regulars need no persuading, and this column is largely made of them. What the fair adds is an unusually concrete engine for a monastic mystery: a charter dispute, a merchant's ledger, three men killed for what they happened to be carrying. If you like historical crime where the period does structural work, this is a strong entry, and 1139 stays specific enough that the politics never dissolve into generic medieval atmosphere. Listeners who want a mystery driven by commerce and municipal grievance, investigated by a monk with no official standing and no obligation to anybody's faction, are well served across the full runtime.
Anyone starting the sequence cold should look elsewhere first, because the record will not say where the sequence begins and the reviews assume you already know. Buyers who need to confirm that a text is complete before paying should also hold off until the abridgment question gets answered somewhere other than a 2013 comment box. And if you are shopping specifically on the strength of a performance, understand that you are buying on one sentence from one listener, filed in 2025 for a recording released in 2012. Cadfael completists will find the paperwork thinner than the recording it describes.
Is this Cadfael audiobook abridged or unabridged?
The listing does not say. One four-star response tells buyers to be sure they get unabridged books, but no field here answers that question and the blurb passes straight over it. The one piece of length information available is the runtime, given as 7 hrs and 52 mins, which you would have to compare against another edition yourself.
What do reviewers say about the audiobook narration?
Exactly one of the five responses mentions it. Carole Fletcher, writing from the United Kingdom, calls the reading clear and says it made the book alive. The other four discuss Ellis Peters, the recurring characters and whether the text is complete. If performance is your deciding factor, that single line is everything on file.
Why does an audiobook listing show an ISBN and a page count?
Because print metadata has been merged into an audio record. A thirteen-digit ISBN sits beside a page count of one, and an invisible formatting mark survives in front of both the publisher name and the language. None of it describes the recording, and it should not change how you read the runtime or the review column.
