An amateur astronomer's wife reports her husband's depression to her pastor in a small town in Pennsylvania's Pocono mountains. He seems fine when the pastor brings the church youth group for an observing session, but soon after is found dead in his observatory, which is locked from the inside. During the funeral, the pastor announces the suspicion that it wasn't a suicide and then works with the owner of a local New Age shop and the police chief to solve the mystery as the three of them had done in Testing the Spirits, the first novel in the series.