CHERRY BEACH

The murder of two teenage girls in Toronto becomes an obsession for both a troubled city and a hard-boiled (but gourmet) detective.

Following an award-winning memoir, fiction for adults and children, a two-volume history of Canada, and 12 Canadian National Magazine Awards, Gillmor shows he has yet another trick up his sleeve. His first crime novel is narrated by police detective Jamieson Abel, a white law school dropout who gets along with exactly nobody on the corrupt Toronto force and is constantly in danger of getting canned before he can make it to retirement. He’s recently been partnered with Davis, a smart, well-spoken Black woman who’s the department’s only claim to diversity and its frequent media representative. As the novel opens, two high school track stars have been brutally murdered in St. James Town, a decaying high-rise community at the heart of multicultural Toronto: "The languages spoken in St. James Town in descending order of percentage are: English, Tagalog, Tamil, Unspecified Chinese, Mandarin, Korean, Spanish, Russian, Serbian, Bengali, Urdu, French, and Other." Under tremendous pressure from the mayor and media to solve this crime, Abel and Davis embark on a wild goose chase to locate the single, rather shaky suspect, a boyfriend of one of the girls. Meanwhile, mayhem in the area is on the rise: a sex worker is killed, one of the towers is burned to the ground, a local thug is the target of a jailhouse hit, large-scale new graffiti is going up nightly. Abel’s instincts tell him that somehow, everything is connected—and real estate values have something to do with it. As he obsessively tracks down leads, he sustains himself with martinis, espresso, and delicious meals for one. Food-loving readers may find themselves trying to replicate his sheet-pan salmon and a salad for which he “tossed together black beans, Kalamata olives, a sharp cheddar that had been aged for eight years, red pepper, and arugula, then made a dressing with olive oil, lime, jalapeños, and cumin.” Gillmor really knows his stuff—in a dazzling range of areas.

A layered portrait of a changing city in the guise of a gripping crime novel, for fans of Tana French and Dennis Lehane.