Graduate student Christina Desroches is working on her translation of a Medieval Saint's life that's anything but ordinary. Not only does it involve forgeries, theft, lies and manipulation, but the narrator repeatedly and strongly warns of the dangers of translating it. When the murder of her mentor convinces her that something in the ancient manuscript is indeed important enough to kill for even now, her scholarly research becomes a desperate quest that has her racing from New York, to Paris, to the remote village of Sainte Enimie, deep in the Tarn River Gorges. Here, the river has carved rocks into grotesque formations. Nearly deserted villages cling to crumbling cliffs. Dark legends abound. It's a world in which history has left many marks, but all is not as it seems. Nothing is written in stone as Christina fights to solve a mystery that is literally in her blood.