By Liz Soares
When we meet Pirio Kasparov, she’s trying to deal with her alcoholic friend, Thomasina, and Thomasina’s young son, Noah. Pirio was on board a lobster boat that was totaled at sea, killing Noah’s father. She miraculously survived, withstanding frigid ocean temperatures for four hours before she was rescued.
Yet Pirio is not a seasoned fisherwoman of Linda Greenlaw’s ilk. She was just on board the Molly Jones as a favor to Ned. Pirio reports to work daily, often in designer duds, at the Inessa Mark perfumery, in Boston’s Back Bay neighborhood. In fact, she’ll inherit the company someday.
North of Boston, Elisabeth Elo’s first novel, is a complex and exciting thriller featuring an equally complex protagonist. Pirio is smart, brave and compassionate, the daughter of Russian-born parents who built a successful business after they came to the U.S.
After her mother dies, and her father remarries, Pirio rebels and is sent to a school in Maine for behaviorally challenged teens. There she meets Thomasina, another rich girl and wild spirit, and the two specialize in breaking the rules. Pirio continues her self-destructive behavior into adulthood—drinking, partying, and having relationships with working-class men like John Oster.
She and Johnny would sit by the ocean, “bathed in yellow moonlight, swigging from a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and making up half-true things to tell each other.” And later? “We used to copulate with abandon, Johnny and me.”
Now, with Ned gone, she feels she needs to be responsible for vulnerable Noah. She also wants to find out the truth about Ned’s death. The accident was a hit-and-run—but how can a hulking tanker ram through a lobster boat and then completely disappear?
A Coast Guard officer tells Pirio, “Other than your eyewitness testimony, I don’t even have proof that a collision occurred.” This just gets her gorge up even more.
Pirio’s investigation leads her to the Ocean Catch fish company, where Ned once worked, and where John Oster is still employed. She goes to Florida so Navy doctors can test her tolerance to icy water, and she manages to replicate her performance at sea. We follow her—by car, single-engine plane, luxury yacht and public transit— from her father’s Beacon Hill townhouse to the dank Boston waterfront and all the way to Labrador, where she finally uncovers the secrets that Ned knew, and that made him too dangerous to live.
She too eventually learns too much, and ends up in a precarious situation on the high seas. Although she manages to elude her captors, she can’t stop their cruel and bloody business. All she can do is use her skills to mitigate their evil—and, finally, help bring them to justice.
North of Boston is filled with interesting characters, including a disabled journalist, an Inuit father and son, and an Ocean Catch retiree who makes important connections for Pirio, as they stroll the paths along the Jamaicaway, part of Frederick Law Olmstead’s “Emerald Necklace” of green spaces in the Hub.
Then, of course, there’s Pirio herself. She demonstrates her uniqueness when she stops and buys a few things at Quincy Market: “warm socks, rubber-soled shoes, rain gear. Godiva chocolate and a short cigar. Ray-Ban aviator sunglasses.” With the addition of two cameras, she is ready to go undercover as ship’s cook.
Sometimes, between Pirio’s concern for Noah, her love/hate relationship with her father, and her desire to replicate her mother’s signature perfume, there seems to be a little too much going on in Pirio’s world. But that’s just a quibble. Thrillers—and heroines—don’t get much better than this.
