Rebecca is excited to chat with Canadian author Alexis Stefanovich-Thomson about his second book in the Patrick Bird Mystery series; the first is The Road to Heaven, published by Dundurn Press in 2024. Opposite Sully's Gym, book two, is available beginning March 31, 2026.

Dundurn Press: https://www.dundurn.com/books_/t22117/a9781459755888-opposite-sully-s-gym

"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 had assassinated Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. just weeks earlier and 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 center of one of the most infamous assassinations of the twentieth century, leading our truculent PI to just about the toughest spot he could imagine."

Authors and books recommended:

"The Man Who Went Down Under" (Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine July/August 2022) by Alexis Stefanovich-Thomson
The Lady in the Lake (Philip Marlowe #4) by Raymond Chandler
Double Indemnity by James M. Cain
The Chill (Lew Archer #11) by Ross Macdonald
City Primeval; Unknown Man #89 (Jack Ryan #2); LaBrava by Elmore Leonard
The Cold Six Thousand (Underworld USA #2) by James Ellroy
Harry Bosch series by Michael Connelly
Thursday Murder Club series by Richard Osman
Hard Rain Falling by Don Carpenter

https://www.alexisstefanovichthomson.com/

https://www.instagram.com/alexis.stefanovich.thomson