Inspired by the historical testimony of Grazida Lizier, a young woman changed with Heresy by the Inquisition in medieval France, The Good Men is a passionate, sweeping story of human tragedy. The heresy of the Cathars, also known as the Good Men, flourished in the Languedoc in the latter 12th and early 13th centuries. Extreme dualists, the Cathars believed that while God created the soul and its spiritual domains, Satan created the body, the earth, and all matter. They conceived of Christ not as a man, but as a pure spirit, with merely the illusion of human form. Their followers led ascetic lives in anticipation of spiritual salvation. Alarmed by the rising popularity of the Cathars, Pope Innocent III launched a brutal holy war against them in 1208. By 1321, the last known Good Man had been killed. Against this backdrop, Charmaine Craig sets her story of the people of medieval Montaillou, a village in the Pyrenees.

Spanning three generations, The Good Men follows the passions of characters torn between desires for spiritual grace and fleshly pleasure, and caught between the power of the written word and the pull of the natural order: Bernard, the young Dominican Friar, who enters the monastery as an orphan and, at an early age, takes on the charge of the Inquisition; Pierre Clergue, the village priest, whose physical shortcomings, insecurities, and fierce attraction to the young Grazida lead him to betray himself and countless others; Fabrisse, Grazida's mother, who squanders her youth and desire on Pierre, never realizing they are blood relations; Arnaud, a doctor's son, whose love of Ovid and one youthful sexual encounter make him a target for the Inquisition; and Grazida herself, whose devotion to nature and thirst for knowledge lead to her undoing.

The Good Men is remarkable not only for its historically accurate feel—Craig traveled to France and extensively researched the Inquisition against the Cathars—but also for its moving dramatization of how small, and at times barely comprehensible, differences in faith that were the impetus for terrible destruction. Through beautifully drawn characters, Craig reanimates questions of religious belief and faith that are as relevant now as in the fourteenth century and, in the process, exposes human nature in all its baseness and beauty.