Heavyweight Notre Dame professor Roger Knight and his p.i. brother Philip investigate a baffling puzzle when some extremely rare literary documents go missing in the fifth installment of this smart academic mystery series. Complicating matters for the brothers are the impending nuptials of some dear friends, Larry Morton and Nancy Beatty, which hit a snag. When Larry was an undergraduate at Notre Dame he made a prudent but overly optimistic reservation to marry his freshman sweetheart, Dolores Torre, in the popular campus rectory six years in the distant future. Their relationship didn't last, and now Larry wants to use the reservation to marry Nancy. Unfortunately, his old girlfriend Dolores has a similar plan.

When both Larry and Dolores try to claim the forgotten reservation on the appointed date for their very separate marriages, pandemonium ensues. Dolores's new fiance, Dudley, is a man with a troubling secret past that may come back to haunt all of them. When a woman winds up strangled to death, both weddings are suddenly on hold until everyone can figure out what's going on. What is Dudley's connection with the missing documents, and how could such a white-collar, academic crime lead to a grisly murder? Between the two of them, Roger and Phil Knight can handle many tough questions-but this particular puzzle is bound to prove quite a challenge in this intelligent, witty mystery from one of the genre's masters.