Columbo is invited as guest speaker in a Criminology course and squares off against two cunning students, who are confident they have duped the lieutenant with various leads, when their professor is found murdered.

A successful writer of romance novels who is involved with a young, ambitious womanizer, is found shot to death in her Malibu home.

The unsuccessful junior partner in a dental group, a bad husband and degenerate gambler, faces divorce and ostracism from his father-in-law's firm.

A woman who blames Columbo for the loss of her husband sets out to get back at him.

This time Columbo is put on a murder that was made to look like a suicide. However, he notices some loose ends, and asks a lawyer and a governor to clear these problems up.

When Dian Hunter, the publisher of the men's magazine "Bachelor's World", wants to sell her stock to a media tycoon, her adulterous partner Sean Brantley objects. Soon afterwards, Miss Hunter apparently disappears on a London-bound flight.