An ICU nurse and a hospital chaplain fight bureaucratic bungling, medical arrogance, and their own limitations as their patients hover between death and life.

Clio Griffin, an out-of-work academic with an attitude and a tendency toward sarcasm, travels to England to interview for a last-chance job--as the pet historian for an antiquarian group who hope to use her to build the reputation of the local saint--Alban, the first Christian martyr of Britain. No sooner does she arrive than the saint, dead for seventeen centuries, starts talking to her--out loud. The voice is hard enough for Clio to take; her mother, in her final illness, had lost touch with reality, and Clio fears the same fate. When the saint drags her unwilling into the past, to live the lives of people long dead, Clio fights to hold on to her reason. The story question: how does a modern, skeptical, rational person fit the irrational, the supernatural, into her life and still make some kind of sense of it all? The answer: not easily.