When Claire was 7, her parents took her and her older sister on a trip to the Caribbean. At their luxury resort on Saint X, Claire watched her sister, a Princeton college student, as she plays volleyball, lays on the beach, and flirts with the boys. Like a good sister, she doesn’t wake up when Alison sneaks out of the hotel room in the middle of the night. She doesn’t tell her parents. But then there’s the morning the Alison doesn’t come back, and their lives are changed forever.

Alison’s body was found in a small cove, floating in a pool under a waterfall. Locals were questioned and then released. No one was ever arrested. Claire and her family went back to their home in upstate New York, but nothing was ever the same. Her father spent months fighting with the local police and with the FBI and Interpol to bring someone to justice, but there was not enough evidence for an arrest.

As the years go by, the family knows they must change. They move to California. Claire finishes school, and then college, and then moves to New York City to work in a publishing house. She has a good life, a job that she loves, caring friends, a future that stretches out in front of her.

Until she steps into that cab.

One day, stepping into a cab in Manhattan, Claire comes face to face with Clive Richardson. She hadn’t seen him since that vacation in Saint X. He was one of the locals that the Saint X police had questioned. He had been released. But Claire is convinced that he knows something. And she is determined to find out what it is, even if it costs her everything.

Saint X is Alexis Schaitkin’s debut novel, a powerhouse of a thriller that turns a crime inside out to show how it can affect not just the victim, not just the family, but anyone who comes in contact with the murder. Told from multiple perspectives, Saint X captures the long-term consequences of one crime of passion, the way that the pain and the confusion and the fear trickles through the family, the suspects, even the larger world, like a waterfall of grief.

Going deeper than a typical thriller, infused with pathos, lovingly written with thoughtful descriptions, Saint X is unlike any book you’ll read this year, and it’s worth your time to check out.

Galleys for Saint X were provided by Celadon Books, with many thanks.