Most of the crime books I love have characters I feel invested in; this, Elisabeth Elo’s first book, I adored for the writing. Pirio Kasparov, head of her mother’s perfume company, isn’t easy to love, but her general bad-assery is admirable and she’s unwilling to let the death of a friend be brushed aside like the authorities intend. Pirio – an adventurous sort, to say the least – is assisting her friend Ned on his fishing boat when it is rammed by a freighter in heavy fog. Ned goes down with the ship, calling for help. Left for hours in freezing water, Pirio, miraculously, survives – and it is this miracle that everyone wants to dissect, not the circumstances of Ned’s death. While authorities question and test Pirio’s physical endurance, she’s left to pursue what everyone dismisses as an accident on her own.

This book is so beautifully written I never wanted the crime to be solved. Pirio’s senses are finely tuned, to everything from delicate notes of perfume to the literary map of Boston that she so loves; from the emotions of her distant, hard father to the descriptions of frozen water that should kill her. As a perfumer, Pirio’s investigation is flawed, but not to the detriment of the book – her decisions are still (mostly) sound, and it’s enough to be pulled along by her determination to find answers to the questions that surround Ned’s death. This is as warm a literary read as the Atlantic is cold.

Fiona Hardy