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...