The Reeve's Tale by Margaret Frazer

This is a historical detective mystery, and one of a series of Sister Frevisse mysteries.  I haven’t read any of the others, but I will now.  I wish I could have started with the first, but the library didn’t have it.  The setting is a 15th century English village and priory.  Frazer is accurate in her period detail, and stays away from the upper classes, thank goodness.  There are already too many books with ladies fainting in castles and knights galloping to their rescue.  Those sorts of books tend to be historically inaccurate, anyway.  With The Reeve’s Tale, it was refreshing to read about a manor village and its villeins and freeborn, instead of the inhabitants of the manor.  In fact my main enjoyment of the book came from its social history, and not from the detective plot.  The latter was pretty good, although a little easy to guess the “whodunit”.