Saint X Summary
Alexis Schaitki

Saint X Overview

Saint X by Alexis Schaitkin begins as a conventional whodunnit—a wealthy white American college girl is found dead at a posh Caribbean resort where she is vacationing with her family for the Christmas holidays—deftly deconstructs into a taut psychological study of the impact of the death nearly 20 years afterwards not only on the girl's younger sister but as well on the resort employee initially suspected but never charged in the death. Using a splintered point of view narrative that deploys more than a half dozen first-person narrators which reflect the younger sister’s obsessive efforts to reconstruct the night her sister died, Saint X explores themes of the elusiveness of truth, the impact of grief, the media’s rapacious appetite for sensational crime cases that involve young white female victim, the persistence of the Ugly American syndrome amid the new millennium tourist culture, and the dark psychology of racism.