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.

Spring 1968: The suspicious death of a tenant in an Ossington Avenue rooming house.

The dead man: Jack Turner, freelance photographer, his darkroom on the third floor demolished.

The reluctant detective: Patrick Bird thought he was helping his mother-in-law collect the rent from one of her wayward tenants, not starting an investigation.

The tenants: Shirley Burton, the young nurse, far from home; Mr. Yusuf, the international student, training to be a doctor; and Danny Blinken, the taxi driver, shifty and belligerent.

But there's still one more room, on the second floor, empty and for rent now. And Bird's investigation leads to the startling truth: its former tenant was James Earl Ray, the international fugitive who assassinated Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis, just weeks earlier, before crossing the border to hide out in Toronto.

Bird starts getting the idea that he might be in too deep.