Author: Jennifer Hillier
Genre: Thriller, Mystery, Suspense
Pages: 311
Release Date: June 12, 2018
* Trigger warnings available below
“Because buried things can, and do, come back.”
Georgina Shaw
My Blurb for Jar of Hearts
Georgina Shaw appears to have it all. She’s a successful, young VP of a pharmaceutical company, engaged to the CEO and seems to have it all. But at 16 years old, her best friend Angela Wong went missing one weekend and was never found – until now.
Now, 14 years later, the past is catching up with her. Angela’s remains were found in the woods behind her childhood home. Her high school ex-boyfriend, Calvin James, has been charged with not only the murder of Angela, but three others and considered a serial killer. She’s arrested by her old best friend Kaiser, now a Seattle detective on the case, been charged as an accomplice, takes a plea deal, and is being sent to prison for 5 years.
While it seems all past secrets have come to light, there are still many more hidden away. Calvin James has escaped from prison. New bodies are popping up. And Geo is finally released from prison and rebuilding her life, just in time to encounter these new murders on the news – will she be next?
Kaiser’s seen this all before. And he caught Calvin James once, he can do it again. And maybe he’ll find forgiveness for Geo along the way.
“She wasn’t perfect, but neither was Angela. In every story, there’s a hero and villain. Sometimes one person can be both.”
georgina Shaw
My Thoughts on Jar of Hearts
This book is incredibly dark and should come with a plethora of trigger warnings, which I did not know before reading. Obviously there’s murder, but also dismemberment of said bodies, SA (multiple instances in detail), domestic violence and assault, kidnapping, cheating, and infertility struggles.
Aside from that though, I thought this book was really good for a thriller/mystery book. I needed to know what would happen. The book basically starts with Geo on the stands at Calvin’s trial, and then she’s whisked off to jail for 5 years. I was like okay, case closed, we know what happened to Angela. But things are never that simple, we still have a lot to learn about the complexity of the secrets in this book.
Then Calvin escapes like day 1 from prison, and it’s like okay, need to know what he’s going to get up to. Obviously not good. And I feel like that’s the real start of the book, where we’ve got Geo in jail, and we see how she’s learning to hustle and survive the system while also getting flashbacks to high school and her friendship with Angela and Kaiser, and the start of her relationship with Calvin. This is not a love story in the slightest. Her relationship with Calvin was toxic from the start with abuse and an age gap.
The book is also told from Kaiser’s point-of-view where we get more details into the detective work of the case which I enjoyed. I’m not sure we needed his side relationship.
Overall, this book kept me wanting to know what the full story was, and we did get it by the end. And there were definitely small clues throughout the book that helped piece it together which became “A-ha!” moments. While there’s a tiny epilogue, I wanted more. I guess I wanted more explanations and to understand the serial killer mindset, the why, but I guess that’s the way the world works. Some people are just monsters.
Farewell Thoughts
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