Jar of Hearts by Jennifer Hiller, 4 Stars

I’m currently missing my son’s last soccer game of the season. I’d like to be there, but its raining outside and the littles wouldn’t last long watching a soccer game in this weather. I feel bad, but I also feel a little excited, because a rainy morning spent inside reading, blogging and drinking all the coffee is kind of….heaven.

What are you up to this lazy Saturday morning?

Today I’m reviewing Jar of Hearts by Jennifer Hiller, which I loved! It’s a June 2018 LibraryReads selection and it comes out next Tuesday, June 12, 2018, so you don’t have to wait long at all to get your hands on a copy!

From the Publisher:

When she was sixteen years old, Angela Wong—one of the most popular girls in school—disappeared without a trace. Nobody ever suspected that her best friend, Georgina Shaw, now an executive and rising star at her Seattle pharmaceutical company, was involved in any way. Certainly not Kaiser Brody, who was close with both girls back in high school.

But fourteen years later, Angela Wong’s remains are discovered in the woods near Geo’s childhood home. And Kaiser—now a detective with Seattle PD—finally learns the truth: Angela was a victim of Calvin James. The same Calvin James who murdered at least three other women.

To the authorities, Calvin is a serial killer. But to Geo, he’s something else entirely. Back in high school, Calvin was Geo’s first love. Turbulent and often volatile, their relationship bordered on obsession from the moment they met right up until the night Angela was killed.

For fourteen years, Geo knew what happened to Angela and told no one. For fourteen years, she carried the secret of Angela’s death until Geo was arrested and sent to prison.

While everyone thinks they finally know the truth, there are dark secrets buried deep. And what happened that fateful night is more complex and more chilling than anyone really knows. Now the obsessive past catches up with the deadly present when new bodies begin to turn up, killed in the exact same manner as Angela Wong.

How far will someone go to bury her secrets and hide her grief? How long can you get away with a lie? How long can you live with it? Find out in Jennifer Hillier’s Jar of Hearts.

My Review:

I loved, loved, loved this book. Think Orange is the New Black meets Everything I Never Told You meets Dexter. The book opens on a trial, with beautiful Geo on the stand. She’s cut a deal, accepting some type of guilt for the murder of her best friend fourteen years before and is headed to prison for five years.

Sounds like an end, but it’s just the beginning. Hiller masterfully cuts between Geo’s life in prison, the perspective of a detective who is too close the case, and flashbacks to high school when it was just Geo and her best friends, Angela and Kaiser.

This book had me from the first page I read all the way to the end. And it’s the kind of book I wish I could go back and read for the first time all over again. There are tons of delicious twists and turns as Hiller deliberately peels back each layer of the story. Warning to some readers, there were sensitive topics in the book and some of the descriptions of the crimes were hard to read.

But things are very seldom exactly what they seem and Hiller does an amazing job of changing expectations and artfully spinning a complex but satisfying thriller.

Special thanks to Minotaur Books, an imprint of St. Martin’s Press and Netgalley for an advanced e-galley of the book in exchange for my honest review.

Get your copy:

Indiebound