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A review by enchantedfiction
Saint X by Alexis Schaitkin
3.0
When six year old Claire is on vacation with her family in the Caribbean, she is excited to spend time with her college age older sister Alison. But Alison slips away each night when she believes that Claire is asleep, and on their last night, never returns. In the wake of her disappearance, Claire believes her sister will return, though her frantic parents and the police are more uncertain. When Alison turns up dead, everything changes. Years later, Claire, now Emily, has become an adult and is on her path to a good life. But fate plays its hand and lands her in Clive Richardson's taxi, one of the men suspected of murdering her sister all those years ago. This encounter throws Emily back into those years and she is determined more than ever to figure out what happened to Alison, even if it means cozy-ing up with a suspected killer.
The premise for this story intrigued me and set my sights on downloading an ALC from Libro.fm. It was in the realm of murder mystery with a twist, which I really enjoy. The beginning of the story to me was fun because it was the family on vacation, and mainly from an omniscient narrator, though we never knew what happened to Alison. I also thought that Claire/Emily's growth that was briefly gone over was believable, and I liked that it didn't spend a ton of time going over the years leading to when the current events of the story was taking place. I enjoyed the different readers for the chapters that followed Claire/Emily and Clive, and the little tidbits from other people that were briefly mentioned and their statements taken from the police. But there was a little bit missing from the story to me, which is why I am giving this book a rating of 3 stars. It was an overall good story and the ending was not at all what I was expecting, but somewhere in the middle got a little tedious and slightly boring. But it was also a believable story throughout, since it didn't have any really fantastical events that happened since those types of things usually only happen in books and not in real life. This felt like a real life attempt at a suspicious death and the aftermath of how it effects different people's lives. I personally don't read a ton of books like this, usually I like the outrageous or strange events that happen in thrillers and mysteries, so I think I would have appreciated it more if it was less realistic.
I would definitely recommend the listening experience for this book since it is a full cast and the readers are all fun to listen to.
The premise for this story intrigued me and set my sights on downloading an ALC from Libro.fm. It was in the realm of murder mystery with a twist, which I really enjoy. The beginning of the story to me was fun because it was the family on vacation, and mainly from an omniscient narrator, though we never knew what happened to Alison. I also thought that Claire/Emily's growth that was briefly gone over was believable, and I liked that it didn't spend a ton of time going over the years leading to when the current events of the story was taking place. I enjoyed the different readers for the chapters that followed Claire/Emily and Clive, and the little tidbits from other people that were briefly mentioned and their statements taken from the police. But there was a little bit missing from the story to me, which is why I am giving this book a rating of 3 stars. It was an overall good story and the ending was not at all what I was expecting, but somewhere in the middle got a little tedious and slightly boring. But it was also a believable story throughout, since it didn't have any really fantastical events that happened since those types of things usually only happen in books and not in real life. This felt like a real life attempt at a suspicious death and the aftermath of how it effects different people's lives. I personally don't read a ton of books like this, usually I like the outrageous or strange events that happen in thrillers and mysteries, so I think I would have appreciated it more if it was less realistic.
I would definitely recommend the listening experience for this book since it is a full cast and the readers are all fun to listen to.