Constance and Charlie

Private eye Charlie Meiklejohn is called in by insurance companies to investigate a suspected serial arsonist. The arsonist, Carson Danvers, has been on a fanatical crusade since the loss of his wife and son, burning down a series of old, shut-up wooden buildings in which random outbreaks of madness and murder have been occurring. Meiklejohn begins to follow the criminal's trail, but finds himself teaming up with his quarry to face the source of these strange outbreaks: a malfunctioning alien space probe.

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.

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.