Give me a good thriller or mystery, and I can generally just rip right through it. Saltwater started off so slowly that I had to drag myself to finish it. The characters, for the most part, were entirely despicable, spoiled, and unrelatable. Helen, whose mother died when she was a child, is somewhat sympathetic because her rich family cordoned her off so thoroughly from reality, yet she doesn’t really rebel. Her friend, Lorna, is hired as an administrative assistant, had a rough upbringing, and so she generates a bit of sympathy as well. Mostly this is simply rich people behaving poorly.
I didn’t care for the style of the writing. The voices of the four main female characters were basically identical. Even with each chapter labeled with the character whose point of view it is in, I sometimes couldn’t tell the POV had changed. The time frame bounces from past to present which usually is intriguing, but since the voices were so similar, it seemed pointless. The beginning was slow, then it ramped up quickly. The plot twists at the end seem just too far-fetched. Hays managed to capture some of the essence of Capri but missed the mark on Milano and Napoli.
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Saltwater (Ballantine Books, March 25, 2025) is available through:
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