A missing tenant, an irate mother-in-law, and a killer hiding in a Toronto rooming house — out-of-work PI Patrick Bird is back in business.

Patrick Bird thought he was helping his mother-in-law collect back rent from a deadbeat tenant at her Ossington Avenue rooming house, not starting a new investigation. But when he discovers Jack Turner’s third-floor darkroom is demolished and the photographer is missing, the other tenants come under scrutiny: Mr. Yusuf, the international student training to be a doctor; Danny Blinken, the shifty taxi driver; and Shirley Burton, the young nurse far from home.

As Bird investigates, he uncovers information about a former tenant. James Earl Ray, who assassinated Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. just weeks earlier, had been hiding out in a room on the second floor.

The case takes Bird and the police down a path of intrigue reaching right into the centre of one of the most infamous assassinations of the twentieth century and leading our truculent PI to just about the toughest spot he could imagine.