Charles Bentley is celebrating his seventieth birthday when a dying man stumbles into his life. A man who has just been stabbed in the heart. As Charles and his wife, Joanna, chief of police in the western Massachusetts town of Opalsville, investigate the man's murder, they soon find that, as a high-pwered divorce lawyer, he had more than the normal share of enemies. So it proves challening to discover which one on them was responsible for giving Charles A KILLER BIRTHDAY.