Charlie Parker is a lost soul. Deprived of his private investigator's license and under scrutiny by the police, he has been forced to seek work in a Portland bar. But he is using his enforced retirement to begin a different kind of investigation: an examination of his own past and an inquiry into the death of his father, who took his own life after apparently shooting dead two unarmed teenagers, a search that will eventually lead Parker to question all that he believed about his beloved parents, and about himself. But there are other forces at work: a troubled young woman who is running from an unseen threat, one that already seems to have taken the life of her boyfriend; a journalist-turned-writer named Mickey Wallace who is conducting an investigation of his own into Parker in the hope of writing a nonfiction book about his exploits. And haunting the shadows, as they have done throughout Parker's life, are two figures: a man and a woman who appear to have only one purpose: to bring an end to Charlie Parker's existence¿