The book that goes nowhere

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I hoped that Saint X would be a thriller about a girl who ends up dead on her family vacation to the island of Saint X. I read a lot of reviews that warned that this was not a thriller so much as a mystery. With that, I lowered my expectations that it wouldn't be a fast paced, twisty read, but I still had high hopes in the mystery aspect. Overall, I was disappointed. The beginning of the novel was told in a really strange way, not from the point of view of anyone but also not exactly in third person either? Half the time I wasn't sure which characters they were referring to as there were many people on the island that were being referred to in this odd way.

When we finally know for sure who the main family is, the tale switches between points of view of a lot of different people on the island and eventually is told in a way that makes more sense to read. However, I felt like the whole book was explaining the background stories in flashbacks of all these characters, sometimes pertinent and sometimes not which didn't really add to the story line but was almost detracting from the story line of trying to figure out how the girl ended up dead.

Overall, I never connected with any character and I wasn't satisfied with the way the mystery was "solved." I often felt that the book didn't really flow naturally and I ended up skimming large chunks of chapters by the last quarter of the book because it just wasn't pertinent information. I was considering DNFing by around page 70. I think the author's intent was to show that everyone has baggage, a past, etc. and you never really know what's going on for people by just their outward demeanor, but it didn't work for me.