Jar of Hearts

I came to this one backwards. I read Little Secrets first, the 2020 Hillier novel about a missing boy and a husband having an affair, and liked how little patience it had with its own heroine. A friend told me the earlier book was meaner and sadder, and that I should read it with the lights on. She was right on both counts, though not in the way I expected.

Jar of Hearts was first published in 2018 by Minotaur Books. The hardcover runs 320 pages, ISBN 9781250154194, and it won the ITW Thriller Award for best hardcover novel. It follows three high school friends in the Seattle area across fourteen years: Angela Wong, who disappears at sixteen; Georgina "Geo" Shaw, who knows more than she admits; and Kaiser Brody, who grows up to carry a badge. Everything below spoils the book on purpose. These are full summaries, not teasers, so stop here if you want the twists cold.

What stayed with me is how physical Hillier makes guilt. For Geo it has an address: certain streets she avoids, years she counts, a gun under her pillow long before you understand why. What wore me down, and I mean this as fair warning rather than dismissal, is the middle stretch in prison, which keeps repeating its point after making it. More on that below.

The party and the woods

Geo is sixteen, bright, living with her dad Walter after her mom's death from cancer when Geo was five. She rarely stays out late because her dad cannot sleep until she is home. Her two best friends are Angela Wong, popular and pretty and good at everything, and Kaiser Brody, the boy who has loved Geo since forever without saying it right.

Then there is Calvin James. Early twenties, gorgeous, with his own apartment and a job and all the patience in the world for a sixteen-year-old girl who mistakes attention for love. Geo falls for him fast and hides the relationship from her friends, which is the first secret and not the worst one. He picks her clothes, picks her friends, sets the pace of everything physical. She tells herself this is what passion looks like. She is sixteen. She has no other model.

One Friday night seals everything. Geo and Angela drink at a party, then head to Calvin's place to keep drinking, with music and dancing that tips from fun into something reckless. Geo passes out. She wakes to find Calvin assaulting Angela. When Angela says she will go to the police, Calvin strangles her with his belt while Geo watches, frozen, drunk, useless. I believed this scene completely, which made it hard to read. Hillier does not write it to titillate. She writes it as fast, stupid, and final. One minute there are three drunk kids in an apartment. The next there is a body.

The cover-up is worse because Geo helps. Threatened and weeping, she helps Calvin carry Angela's body to the woods behind her childhood home and bury it. A much later flashback adds the detail that chills the whole book in retrospect: the dismembering was Geo's idea, carried out with a saw when Calvin went nauseous and froze. I go back and forth on whether that memory is accurate or Geo rewriting her own guilt to punish herself more. Either way the result is the same. The next day she lies to Angela's parents and to the police, says she last saw Angela at the party, and pretends to help search. She means to confess. Before she can, Calvin climbs through her window, assaults her once more, and vanishes from town.

She misses months of junior year without explanation. She is pregnant, and nobody knows except eventually the reader.

A good life built on a grave

Fourteen years pass. Geo is thirty now, an executive at a Seattle pharmaceutical company, engaged to its CEO Andrew, living the managed life of a woman who organized her guilt into calendar invites. As far as I could tell she has not seen Calvin since that night, has barely spoken to Kaiser in years, and has told no one the truth. Not her fiance. Not her dad. Nobody.

Then someone walking the woods finds Angela's remains behind Geo's childhood home. Kaiser, now a detective with Seattle PD, catches the case, and the forensics point at Calvin James, who by this point has been caught and exposed as the Sweetbay Strangler, a serial killer with at least three other women dead.

Geo is arrested. To avoid dying in prison she takes a deal: full testimony against Calvin, five years served. The trial chapters are some of the book's best. Calvin at thirty-five still looks like a movie star, still smiles at Geo like they share a joke. During a break he passes her a scrap of paper with two words and a small drawn heart, which she crumples into a bead and swallows. I mention this because it comes straight from the book and because it tells you everything about them: he still thinks they are a love story, and she would rather eat the evidence than be seen holding it.

On the stand Geo describes the control, the hitting, the assault, the night Angela died. It reads as honest, and mostly it is, except for the parts where it isn't, which the book doles out later. Calvin is convicted. Geo goes away for five years. Her fiance does not wait, her company does not keep her chair warm, and the Seattle press calls her every name available. Only her dad visits without flinching.

The five years inside

Hazelwood Correctional Institute is the kind of place where a new woman gets tested on day one, and Geo fails the test on night three in the worst way. I will not describe it beyond that. The book doesn't linger either, which I respected. What follows is Geo learning the prison economy fast because the alternative is not surviving it.

Her way in is Ella Frank, a lifer who runs the drug trade inside and needs someone with a head for money. Geo becomes that person, laundering cash through phone calls with an outside "financial planner," setting up college funds for Ella's kids, keeping books in her head. In return she gets protection and a job in the salon, where she befriends Cat Bonaducci, her first real female friend since Angela. Cat is seriously ill with cancer, and Geo's determination to get her care reads as penance for every person Geo failed to help before. There is also a corrections officer who trades small comforts for sex, which the book presents without glamour or preaching. It is transactional. Geo hates herself a little and does it anyway.

Two threads hum underneath the routine. Kaiser pays for reports on Geo's calls and letters, sure Calvin will reach out. Nothing comes except a run of letters signed with superhero names, which turn out to be from a foster kid doing a school project on prison life. I loved those letters. They are the only warm mail Geo gets, and she answers them, and for a few pages the book breathes. The other thread is the stack of letters Geo refuses to open. You will guess who they are from before she admits it. She stacks them unopened for years because opening them would mean feeling something she cannot afford inside.

Then the news breaks: Calvin has escaped. The book handles this mostly through Kaiser's dread rather than action scenes, which works. Every phone call Geo makes, every visitor log, gets re-read for signs. Nothing. That nothing is its own kind of fear.

Bodies in the same woods

Days before Geo's release, the woods behind her childhood home give up two more bodies. A young woman, dismembered like Angela. A two-year-old boy, strangled, with a heart and the words SEE ME drawn on his chest in lipstick. The woman is Claire Toliver, a law student. The boy is Henry Bowen, the child Claire gave up for adoption as a baby. And Henry's biological father is Calvin James, who dated Claire without telling her what he was.

I had to put the book down here. The pattern is plain and awful in a precise way. Someone is killing Calvin's secret children and their mothers and leaving them where Angela lay, with a message in makeup.

Geo gets out into this. She moves in with her dad Walter because no landlord will take her and no employer will hire her. Someone spray-paints hate on her garage and her car. Her parole officer is decent. Strangers are not. She starts spending time with Kaiser, who tells her about Claire and Henry and warns her Calvin may come for her. Kaiser has loved her since high school and never stopped, and Geo, who finally sees him clearly without Calvin in the way, sleeps with him. It is tender and a little desperate, two damaged people in their thirties checking whether comfort is still available. I found it moving, though one scene where they cook together felt staged to prove normalcy. People in this situation would order takeout. Small thing. It nagged me.

Then it happens again. Sasha Robinson and her four-year-old daughter Emily, same pattern: mother dismembered, child strangled with the heart and SEE ME. Sasha gave Emily up for adoption years earlier because of addiction. Her grandmother identifies Emily's father from old photos. Calvin again. That makes four new dead, two mothers and two children, all tied to one man. And Kaiser, going back over the months after Angela vanished, finally does the math he should have done at seventeen: Geo missed half of junior year because she was pregnant. With Calvin's child. Which means the person hunting Calvin's children might be hunting hers too.

Dominic

The unopened letters are from Geo's son. Given up at birth to Mark and Nori Kent, a couple Geo chose from profiles because they looked loving and steady, Dominic instead grew up neglected, then bounced through foster care. He is eighteen now. He writes like a boy doing homework on his own life, asking plain questions Geo cannot answer by mail. So she invites him to the house.

Hillier plays the visit the way she plays everything best: food and awkward politeness, with small talk that curdles. Dominic looks like Calvin, which Geo expects and still isn't ready for. He knows things about the new murders he should not know. He corrects himself once too often. Midway through the afternoon Geo understands, with her stomach dropping through the floor, that her son is the killer. Not Calvin. Dominic murdered Claire and Henry, Sasha and Emily, furious that Calvin's other children had mothers who kept them or placed them kindly while he got nothing and nobody. Whether that motive fully explains strangling toddlers is a question the book lets sit without answering, and I think that restraint is correct. Some motives don't survive being spelled out.

What follows is fast and brutal. Dominic attacks Geo, meaning to assault and kill her the way his father killed Angela. Calvin, who has been watching the house since his escape, steps in, saying the new killings drew him back, that he came to keep her safe. For one suspended moment Geo faces both monsters her life made: the boyfriend who ruined her at sixteen and the son she gave away. She keeps a gun under her pillow. She uses it. Both men die in her father's house, and she does not hesitate, and the book does not ask her to apologize.

A year later the epilogue finds Geo at Rose Hill Cemetery. She visits Angela, then her mother, then Dominic, whom she buries in the family plot despite everything, because he was her child and somebody has to love him now. She is with Kaiser. She is pregnant. For the first time since she was sixteen, she says, her happiness outweighs her grief. Endings like this can feel cheap. This one felt purchased.

What holds and what slips

Hillier's grip on guilt is the reason to read her. Geo is not a heroine who learns a lesson. She is a woman who did something unforgivable at sixteen, built a life on top of it, paid five years in a cage, lost the life anyway, and kept going. The book lets her be selfish, sexual, funny in dark places, bad at comfort, good at spreadsheets. Cat's illness brings out the only tenderness Geo trusts, and those salon scenes, with foils and bleach and gossip as cover for real talk, are my favorite pages. Kaiser works too, as the rare decent man in this genre who never becomes a speech. He waits, he investigates, he forgives slowly rather than all at once.

Against that, the middle third sags. Prison routine (another shakedown, another coded call, another favor for Ella) makes its point about survival economics and then keeps making it for fifty pages. Kaiser's investigation chapters sometimes restate what Geo's chapters already showed, so the reveals land twice, once vividly and once as paperwork. The unopened-letters device creaks under five years of never peeking; shame explains it, but the book needs it a little too badly, since the whole climax depends on Geo not knowing her son. And the final shootout, after hundreds of pages of dread, ends in minutes. I wanted one more breath in that room, one more choice visible. As is, it plays as reflex, which may be the point, but it left me blinking.

Content warnings matter here more than usual. Rape on the page, including a scene in prison. Strangulation described plainly. Murdered children, dismembered bodies. If any of that is a line for you, skip this one without guilt. If you like fast, guilt driven thrillers with rough edges, in the lane of Gillian Flynn at her sharpest or Shari Lapena with the gloves off, this belongs on your shelf. Just don't read the last hundred pages before bed. I did, and slept badly, and picked it back up at 2 a.m. to check one detail about the letters, which tells you the important thing: for all its sags, the book holds.