Along with his parents and other equally maladjusted misfits and eccentrics, Francis Orme lives in Observatory Mansions — once a magnificent ancestral home with beautiful grounds, now a crumbling apartment block. In a blocked-off corridor of the basement is Francis’s Exhibition: a carefully catalogued and private display of hundreds of items he has stolen, all of them once precious to their original owners. But the arrival of a new tenant upsets the delicate balance of Observatory Mansions, and Francis finds himself taking drastic measures to protect the secrets of his past, the sanctity of his collection and his mission of love.