Madame Sophie's usually brilliant mediumistic performance was spoiled by a sudden blackout and eerie, unexplained screams and knockings. Chan, the perfect Chinese butler, suddenly was no longer there. Neither was his silver salver. And when pretty Stanford University student Iris Cooper's beau, Clarence Brockhurst, took her upstairs to meet his mummy, they found that 5,000-year-old Ra-Hotep had been ousted from his sarcophagus by the dead body of a scantily clad young woman. Someone at the Brockhursts' palatial Burlingame, California estate that beautiful spring week in 1928 had committed the perfect crime-- without a weapon, without a motive. Was it, as Madame Sophie insisted, the mummy's curse? Or a cold, clever killer on the prowl?