The North Line

March 15, 2024
A summer job on an Alaskan fishing boat pushes a college student to his limits. Stripped of his lacrosse scholarship for a drug infraction, Adam needs to come up with tuition money. On board the Vice, he's as green as they come, and his coarse shipmates Cole and Nash are happy to remind him of all the ways he can kill or maim himself or otherwise mess up their seasonal sprint to the most lucrative fish-breeding grounds. Obstacles abound--diesel spills, cabin fires, terrible food, treacherous paymasters, and the cruel Bering Sea itself. His body dirtied and broken, Adam becomes ever rougher, drinking and fighting just like the rest. Does survival require that he become as brutal as his surroundings? Drawing upon personal experience working on commercial vessels in the 1990s, debut novelist Riordan celebrates "killing fish" (it's always "killing," never "catching") as "one of the last jobs anywhere in the world where we get to do what we were bred to do." In doing so, he participates enthusiastically if somewhat uncritically in the rich tradition of wilderness adventure fiction.

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Starred review from February 19, 2024
Riordan debuts with an irresistible portrait of commerical fishermen fighting for survival in early 1990s Alaska. After Massachusetts college student Adam gets caught selling ecstasy pills and loses his lacrosse scholarship, he sets off for Alaska to earn his senior year tuition. Despite having no experience, he’s hired aboard the well-worn trawler Miami Vice and embarks with captain Nash and fellow crew member Cole for the Bering Sea. Adam, who’s desperate to avoid dropping out of college and returning to his Podunk hometown in Ohio, takes to the work eagerly. The first major sign of trouble comes when the Vice catches fire, forcing the fishermen to sell their haul to a nearby tender whose crew Cole regards as “pirate scum.” With the boat out of commission, Adam boards the Nerka, this time with Vice owner Kaid serving as captain. Other fishermen go on strike as the Nerka departs, protesting unsustainably low prices, but the unscrupulous Kaid presses on, roping Adam and Nash into a treacherous scheme that he lays out in a vivid soliloquy (“Some guys, they end up in the army, charging across some desert somewhere to rescue an oil well. You don’t want to be that guy. You want to be the guy who owns the oil well that the other guy is sent to die for”). The novel’s colorful dialogue and relentless pacing evoke the uncompromising headwinds in Adam’s path. This is a triumph of gritty realism. Agent: Barbara Poelle, Irene Goodman Agency.