June 11, 2026
Cherry Beach, by Don Gillmore
“The city streets were like the forest in the ravine. There was a stillness and order to the untrained eye, but beneath that stillness was a furious cycle of growth and death and decay. People walked by containing guilt and fear and dreams of revenge. They carried debt and perversion and health scares and the sins of their fathers and the doubts of their children. Worlds sashayed by, unglimpsed. If we could see into the soul of everyone in the subway car with us, we wouldn’t be able to bear it.”
I loved this novel by Don Gillmore, set during a hot Toronto summer where things only get hotter after two teenage girls are found murdered in a St. James Town highrise. Cherry Beach is a story of the life of a city, and notions of justice, and who gets to decide, and police corruption, real estate (everything is about real estate) and a system that seems riddled with rot, right to the core. It’s also about alienation, loneliness, and longing, Gillmore’s Detective Jamieson Abel’s complicated humanity so deftly and subtly crafted.
