It is January 1948. Nine-year-old Philip Wade and his family have been uprooted and moved to the small Eastern Oregon town of Baker City, where Philip's father, Kenneth Wade, will begin his career as a mortician. In the spring, the father hires a local recluse, Jack O'Brien, to help put a new roof on their house. Three weeks later, when a school teacher is found beaten to death, Jack O'Brien is accused of her murder. Kenneth Wade emerges as the only person who defends O'Brien--fully believing the man to be innocent. Philip is a spellbound spectator and narrator of his father's consuming struggle to save a man he barely knows. Conversely, he witnesses his mother's determination to keep the specter of violence from distorting the lives of her sons.

Twisted into the father's fixation to wrest Jack O'Brien from custody is the relentless memory of a boyhood friend who, wrongly accused of a killing, hanged himself in his jail cell. This long-ago horror drives Kenneth Wade; he is caught up in the terrible present because of a past that will not let him go. Baker City 1948 is the story of a man's struggle for truth as told to us by the boy who was watching him.