About this item
Highlights
- A brutal murder exposes secret real estate deals, a corrupt police force, and the dark heart of a city simmering with unrest.When two girls are found murdered in a rundown Toronto highrise, Jamieson Abel and his partner are first on the scene.
- About the Author: Don Gillmor is the author of To the River, which won the Governor General's Award for nonfiction.
- 288 Pages
- Fiction + Literature Genres, Literary
Description
Book Synopsis
A brutal murder exposes secret real estate deals, a corrupt police force, and the dark heart of a city simmering with unrest.
When two girls are found murdered in a rundown Toronto highrise, Jamieson Abel and his partner are first on the scene. Abel is 52, a law school dropout turned police detective, chronically at odds with his colleagues and perpetually on the brink of being terminated. Davis, 35, is the department's only female officer of colour not currently suing the city and the police force for systemic racism and sexual harassment. Both understand their being partnered as a form of banishment, but when the details of the murder go public at the start of an excruciatingly hot summer, they find themselves thrust into the centre of a headline investigation that will bring to a head the city's long history of shady real estate deals and racist disenfranchisement.
Intricately plotted and brilliantly layered, Cherry Beach is a gripping literary detective novel about an increasingly unhinged world in which the rich manipulate racial and economic tensions for their own benefit, with little regard for the damage caused by their mercenary callousness.
Review Quotes
Praise for Breaking and Entering
"In a quiet story that takes place over only a few summer months, the Canadian author deftly converges doubt, infidelity and the fragility of family in a narrative that is both thrilling and relatable."
--New York Times
"Surely the most interesting midlife crisis of the year."
--Marion Winik, Oprah Daily
"Knowledge is mostly sadness in this intelligent . . . book: No matter where Bea breaks in, she keeps finding herself."
--Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal
"The genius of this book is to capture the exact way a familiar world of aging parents and divorcing friends and nice charcuterie platters could go right around the bend . . . A smart, funny, and sneakily terrifying version of the way we live now. (Do not read without working air conditioning.)"
--Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Gillmor succeeds at pulling you into the hopes, dreams, expectations, desires, anxieties and pathologies of his characters . . . Like jazz, the moments of tension in the book give away to moments of relief, only to return to building tension once more . . . reading it will strike a chord."
--David Moscrop, Globe and Mail
"A devastating and droll portrait of middle age that will be instantly recognizable to the 'sandwich generation, ' stuck between kids and parents, and just generally stuck. It's a period of life that makes you want to do crazy things, and the only escape is other people."
--Stephen Marche, author of The Next Civil War
About the Author
Don Gillmor is the author of To the River, which won the Governor General's Award for nonfiction. He is the author of four novels, Breaking and Entering, Long Change, Mount Pleasant, and Kanata, a two-volume history of Canada, Canada: A People's History, and nine books for children, two of which were nominated for the Governor General's Award. He was a senior editor at The Walrus, and his journalism has appeared in Rolling Stone, GQ, The Walrus, Saturday Night, Toronto Life, Globe and Mail, and the Toronto Star. He has won twelve National Magazine Awards and numerous other honours. He lives in Toronto.