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. 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.