Review: Jar of Hearts

Jar of Hearts by Jennifer Hillier
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Thank you to Netgalley, St. Martin’s Press and Jennifer Hillier for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Meet Georgina Shaw, Geo to her friends. Beautiful, successful and on her way to jail for being an accessory to murder. Not just anyone, but charged for helping murder her best friend, Angela Wong, when they were just sixteen years old. What’s made it worse is that for fourteen years Georgina kept it a secret. She knew that her boyfriend killed Angela, she was there that night, but she lied to everyone around her and pretended that she knew nothing. Just imagine what she put Angela’s parents through pretending to grieve, all the while knowing that Angela was cut into little pieces and buried in the woods behind her house. She could have spared them the pain of wondering what happened to their daughter but Georgina decided to get on with her life, go to college and work her way up the corporate ladder. So successful at such a young age and to top it off she is even engaged to the head of the company. Oh Andrew, what will happen when he hears the news. And who walks into her boardroom to arrest her but her other best friend, Kaiser, the detective on the case. He has been chasing the “Sweetbay Strangler” for years. They would never have known Georgina was involved if the serial killer hadn’t turned out to be her boyfriend back in high school. Kaiser never like him, Calvin James, but then again he had been in love with Georgina ever since they were kids. Still, Calvin wasn’t a good influence on Georgina. He was older, controlling, but Georgina had never felt like that for anyone ever before in her whole life. Her head was turned upside down and she didn’t care if her grades were dropping, if she was losing her friends, or even, if Calvin sometime hit her. But Georgina has secrets and Calvin know what they are. She can never let anyone know what really happened that night.

This story is told in a multi perspective voice between Kaiser and Georgina. We get to see the relationship of the three friends in high school. Angela was more beautiful, more popular, but definitely more bitchy. In the present we go through Georgina being convicted, her life in jail and life after being released. Calvin, who was supposed to spend the rest of his life in jail, escapes. New murders are taking place, even more gruesome than the originals. Has Calvin escalated? Is he in contact with Georgina? Kaiser might have been the skinny guy who was put in the friend zone, but he is all grown up, confident and handsome, and he wants the whole truth. I have been tiring of this kind of storytelling but this time it was done so well. The story flowed and it wasn’t like chapter 1 - Georgina, chapter 2 - Kaiser, blah blah blah. It would switch voices but the story didn’t stop. The excitement and suspense was allowed to build. There were twists and turns and even though I could see the direction that it was going, I was still wanting to get to the end. There were a lot of moving parts, covered lots of different periods and many characters, but somehow the story never suffered. It all served to enhance the plot.

If you love psychological thrillers, this is one for you. It was dark enough without being disturbing, edgy but with enough story to fill the spaces, characters you care about and want to know more about and a level of detail that made it believable, created depth without getting bogged down. I enjoyed the writing so much I am going to check out Jennifer Hillier’s other novels.


In case you are interested in checking out this novel I have link to a three chapter excerpt
Here: three-chapter excerpt
An interview with Jenny talking about the book here: a video of Jenny


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