Score: 4/5 Bookmarks

Thank you to Libro.fm for gifting me an advance copy of Saint X by Alexis Schaitkin as an audiobook.

I finished Saint X a couple of days ago and I’ve been struggling with what to say about it. It didn’t turn out to be at all like I expected. Going in I thought it was a mystery, but it was so much more than that. Yes, there was a heavy dose of mystery that kept me guessing right up to the end, but it’s also a story about privilege, race, family, obsession, and how a single event (that is sometimes out of our control) can change the entire course of your life, and all those around you.

I just got back from a cruise to the Caribbean, where we spent time in some countries that, while beautiful, had been devastated by hurricanes and not had the money to rebuild. Where around the corner from every fancy resort there lay ruined buildings. Where half-sunk boats littered the harbors, and scraggly chickens roamed the streets. I had very mixed feelings about coming to a place to ‘have a good time’ when locals were so obviously struggling to get by in their everyday lives. We were told that tourism is their main source of income, and that if we didn’t come things would be worse. But it’s hard not to have some seriously mixed feelings, heaped with a big dose of guilt, when faced with the reality of everyday life in ‘paradise’. Saint X explores a lot of those feelings, and lets you hear the story from a variety of perspectives, which I really appreciated.

The audiobook was expertly narrated by several performers, and I’d definitely recommend it. Click the button below and use the code ‘LatestBookCrush’ to get it, along with two free audiobooks. If you’d like a physical copy, click here.

Synopsis:

Claire is only seven years old when her college-age sister, Alison, disappears on the last night of their family vacation at a resort on the Caribbean island of Saint X. Several days later, Alison’s body is found in a remote spot on a nearby cay, and two local men―employees at the resort―are arrested. But the evidence is slim, the timeline against it, and the men are soon released. The story turns into national tabloid news, a lurid mystery that will go unsolved. For Claire and her parents, there is only the return home to broken lives.

Years later, Claire is living and working in New York City when a brief but fateful encounter brings her together with Clive Richardson, one of the men originally suspected of murdering her sister. It is a moment that sets Claire on an obsessive pursuit of the truth―not only to find out what happened the night of Alison’s death but also to answer the elusive question: Who exactly was her sister? At seven, Claire had been barely old enough to know her: a beautiful, changeable, provocative girl of eighteen at a turbulent moment of identity formation.

As Claire doggedly shadows Clive, hoping to gain his trust, waiting for the slip that will reveal the truth, an unlikely attachment develops between them, two people whose lives were forever marked by the same tragedy.