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.