Constance and Charlie

Private investigator Charlie Meiklejohn is called on to follow the trail of a suspected serial arsonist but finds himself teaming up with his quarry to face a much deeper problem: a malfunctioning alien space probe that has caused random outbreaks of madness and murder that occur in old, abandoned wooden buildings.

Constance Leidl and Charlie Meiklejohn are an unlikely pair of detectives. He is a former arson detective; she is a psychologist. Together, the husband-and-wife team has a knack for unraveling a mystery. “Seven Kinds of Death” is a famous sculpture, but the name takes on new meaning when bodies start turning up at the creator's art colony. A party launching the art tour of an old friend and the opening of her husband's condominiums turns tragic when the sculptures are vandalized and one of the guests, a highly regarded art-magazine editor, is found strangled in one of the new condos. Charlie and Constance interview some of the guests and learn there has already been another death at the condo site, viewed at the time as an accident. Connecting the two deaths leads the two sleuths to an unexpected suspect.

Charlie didn't want to take this case—he hated cases involving crazy wills—but when one of the new clients mentioned that the Bainbridge men are cursed, he knew resistance was hopeless: Constance could not resist confronting a curse. In a quiet college town in New Jersey, five million dollars in cashier's checks lies hidden in a dead man's house, and whoever finds the checks gets to keep it all. Four family members have four weeks before the house and its contents become the property of a small college. Soon two deaths by drowning from the past and another clear case of murder in the present complicate matters. It takes the combined skills of a superbly trained homicide detective, Charlie, and an equally well trained psychologist, Constance, to unravel the mystery of the Bainbridge curse—and expose a killer.