The police in Fox River, Illinois, disinter a local mobster, only to find an empty coffin, leaving Father Dowling to figure out how the missing corpse is related to a mysterious Italian manuscript.

Father Dowling comes to the aid of a former classmate who had left the priesthood twenty-five years earlier, when he is sued by a woman alleging that he had sexually exploited her as a child, a case that is complicated by the son she claims is his.

Widowed Susan Nebens is sick of her father-in-law interfering in her life, but she never meant to crush the poor man with her car! When she decides to hide the body instead of report the accident things get more and more complicated.

Detective Phil Knight teams up with his brother, Notre Dame professor Roger Knight, to investigate the theft of some valuable artifacts and the killing of a researcher, crimes that may be linked to a nineteenth-century theologian.

Academic and amateur sleuth Roger Knight and his P.I. brother, Phil, investigate the apparent murder of a member of the Notre Dame athletic department.