When Gianna Petrillo comes home from college with a teaching credential in hand, there were plenty of ghosts to greet her in that small town in Central California — both old and new. Her old flame, who was the son of an oil baron, had married ... but he certainly hadn't settled down. There was something terribly wrong with Harvard Knottingham. He was even threatening to blow up his family's oil wells.

Around the same time, Esther Grimstyle, a peculiar electrical engineer, moves into town. She immediately went house hunting and got a heck of a deal on Miss Toadvine's pink cottage. So what if the previous owner had been murdered there? Oh, it mattered. That house seemed to wear an aura of misfortune like a funeral hat.

If that wasn't bad enough, Miss Toadvine's murderer is still on the lam.