Nurse Meredith Griffin runs St. Jude Hospital's emergency ward, the largest on the Pacific Northwest coast. A psychiatric nursing specialist, she's good at managing other people's problems but is less adept with her own. When a twenty-two-year-old woman is admitted to Emergency with severe lacerations that prove fatal, her death is labelled a suicide, but Meredith isn't convinced. Soon after, her boyfriend, Detective Leo Donnelly, attends the scene of a young woman with the same mysterious fatal injuries, and Meredith knows something is terribly wrong. As she tries to connect the dots, she quickly realises that everyone – in the hospital, the Catholic church and law enforcement – is hiding something, and she must put more than her job on the line to expose the killer before they strike again. A clever and compulsive crime thriller, The Scarlet Cross takes you deep into the dark secrets of institutional power and exposes the thin membrane between safety and peril.