Don Gillmor’s Cherry Beach

The Literary Review of Canada doesn’t cover all that many crime novels, but Cherry Beach, a 2026 book published by Biblioasis and written by a veteran Canadian journalist and novelist, deserves to be treated as an exception. This is a taut, atmospheric book, and it’s an indictment of class interests and racism.

Kevin Jagernauth’s perceptive review describes the novel as “gripping and beautiful”: “Set during a steamy summer of heat waves, it vividly portrays the Big Smoke as a city that has as much ugliness as it has beauty and potential.”

This is a very Toronto book, and it’s not a view of the city that you’ll get from a Margaret Atwood novel.

Corrupt police officers are set against small-time hoodlums teaming up with greedy real estate developers. The brutal murders of two brilliant and promising young women who are close friends–one white, and one Black–pushes the city’s residents, maddened by the heat, close to the breaking point, and the boyfriend of one of the women, quickly assumed to be the assailant, is nowhere to be found.

Our hero, of sorts, is Jamieson Abel, a long-time police officer who sustains a distance at work, where he has no friends and lots of detractors, as well as in his lonely personal life.

From the beginning, he distrusts the public narrative that’s being constructed. A quick-and-easy solution will satisfy the public, but it’s at odds with the deeper level of investigation required to unravel this case.

His partner, Davis, is a driven Black woman in her early thirties. She’s frequently deployed by the department for PR purposes (even while the city is being sued for sexual harassment and Islamophobia by its lone female Muslim officer. And she’s skeptical: he thinks he’s manufacturing a conspiracy theory with sparse evidence to support it, and they mostly pursue their own agendas.

But as further violent events take place, it seems increasingly likely that Jamieson is both right and in jeopardy as his division turns on him.

Instead of turning to alcohol or boxing to cope with stress, Jamieson is deeply committed to . . . cooking. It’s a truism that food features most prominently in the cozy crime novel tradition, but here Gillmor lavishes detailed descriptions on toothsome ingredients and elaborate meal preparation in a book that also has graphic depictions of the assaults and murders on sex workers that seem to have a connection to the police.

And crucially, unlike his fellow officers, who move to the suburbs to escape the city they police, Jamieson is an astute and entrenched Torontonian. He strolls along Queen, shops at the St. Lawrence Market, and people-watches at Trinity-Bellwoods Park. As tension roil, he is attuned to the rising danger because he understands the city.

Jamieson describes an anecdote from his first week of law school: a professor entered the classroom, wrote “Justice” on the chalkboard, and then invited the neophyte law students to unpack the concept. This is a microcosm of Gilmor’s novel, which repeatedly points to a yawning chasm between the administration of the law and the achievement of justice.

While he dropped out of law during third year to care for his dying mother and never returned, Jamieson maintains a commitment to upholding the law that differs from the approach of most of his fellow officers, some of whom are shown to be as brutally thuggish as the criminals they pursue.

This is an extraordinary book. Like the best crime fiction, it conjures up atmosphere so powerfully that for the two days I was reading it I felt immersed in an airless and ashy city summer, the sky turned orange from smoke.

Toronto is suffering through yet another season of heat waves and smog. Right now it’s exacerbated by northern Ontario wildfire smoke (where whole communities, with the heaviest impact on First Nations, are being obliterated). Government help seems to be belated: it’s a good time to remind your Ontario MLA of the obligation to assist, or donate to one of the organizations helping to resettle people as they cope with the trauma of losing their homes.