A Morbid Taste for Bones by Ellis Peters
Published 1977 · 55,000 words · about 4 hours at an average pace · Historical Fiction, Mystery & Crime
How hard is A Morbid Taste for Bones to read?
A Morbid Taste for Bones scores 34 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 45 out of 100
- Medieval terminology, monastic vocabulary, herbal/botanical terms, and Welsh place names.
- Sentence structure: 40 out of 100
- Abstraction: 30 out of 100
- Grounded in concrete detail of medieval life. Themes emerge through character and setting.
- Information density: 45 out of 100
- Moderate density of historical, botanical, and ecclesiastical detail alongside the mystery plot.
- Narrative indirection: 30 out of 100
- Straightforward investigation narrated from Cadfael's perspective with minimal misdirection.
- Symbolic density: 30 out of 100
- The saint's bones serve as a symbol of institutional ambition, but Peters works primarily through realism.
- Ironic distance: 30 out of 100
- Cadfael's worldly wisdom provides gentle irony about monastic pieties, but the tone is warm rather than satirical.
- Resolution withholding: 40 out of 100
- Fair-play mystery with clues distributed throughout. The solution is satisfying but not heavily misdirected.
- Structural complexity: 25 out of 100
- Linear narrative following Cadfael's investigation. Simple, effective structure.
How A Morbid Taste for Bones is regarded
A Morbid Taste for Bones holds a literary regard score of 51 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.