Review of Saltwater by Katy Hays

The glamorous setting of Capri is the star of Saltwater. I struggled to care about the characters' sense of life-and-death stakes regarding their wealth and social status, so I never felt very invested in the story or the unraveling of the mysteries within it.

Thirty years ago, Sarah Lingate was found dead under suspicious circumstances below the cliffs of Capri, leaving behind her young daughter Helen--and a host of relatives who might have wanted Sarah dead. Each year, the wealthy, powerful Lingate family returns to Capri as though to quash rumors about Sarah's mysterious death. (Their yearly return was never explained to my satisfaction; it felt like a gruesome disconnect from emotion, responsibility, and respect for the dead.)

But this year, the family arrives at the villa to find a mysterious, haunting relic from the past waiting for them: the necklace Sarah was wearing when she died.

Young adult Helen, determined to get to the bottom of her mother's death, along with her uncle's assistant, begins to dig into the truth. The two become determined to enact a risky plan to manipulate the family into telling the truth about Sarah's demise. But they uncover layers of danger and begin to fear that not everyone in her family may leave Capri alive.

Saltwater characters are by and large shallow and uninteresting, money-hungry, image-driven, insufferably selfish, and dangerously avoidant of social shaming at any cost.

In alternating points of view, Saltwater tracks from present day back in time. After reading multiple character's viewpoints of key events, much of what was subsequently revealed seemed already evident. The denouements were positioned as emotional and dramatic, but I felt no connection to the characters, so the revelations didn't feel as powerful as they could have been--and the protagonists, in shallow fashion, quickly moved on from life-and-death considerations to superficial concerns such as money and retaining social standing.

Some of the characters repeatedly bemoan the power of money and the lack of freedom associated with being beholden to one's wealthy family, but none learn a lesson about living with integrity or eschewing wealth. In fact, those who finish telling the story are as deeply tied to preserving the family fortune at any cost as ever. I found that I just wasn't invested in any of the characters or their unrelatable issues, which seemed blown out of proportion as life-and-death stakes, so I struggled to finish the story.

However, at the very end of this book, there is a Twist that I did not anticipate, which is intriguing and flips much of the book on its head, and it is followed by another Twist that does it again. For me, these didn't balance out the largely unsatisfying characters and interactions that preceded them, but I did enjoy them.

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I received a prepublication edition of this title courtesy of Ballantine Books and NetGalley. Hays is also the author of The Cloisters.

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