When a Franciscan friar, William of Baskerville, and his novice, Adso of Melk, travel to a Benedictine monastery in Northern Italy, their visit is suddenly disturbed by the suicide of one of the monks. Soon, other monks die under mysterious circumstances and the abbot delegates the investigation to William. However, each murder is murkier than the last, and the clues lead William and Adso to a labyrinthine medieval library. The abbey may be hiding even more secrets than William originally assumed, and he soon discovers that not all is well in the abbey. Using inductive reasoning and the teachings of Aristotle, Aquinas, Roger Bacon and William of Ockham, William begins to match wits with a blind monk in the abbey who chooses to follow a more deductive outlook on the murders. The answers, William believes, may lie in the abbey’s labyrinth, where the most curious events take place at night. Can this unlikely pair discover who, in the name of God, is getting away with murder?