At a fan convention in Las Vegas, hemmed in by a crowd and already having the worst month of her professional life, a reality star feels a hand close hard on her arm and swings without looking. She is aiming at the gossip blogger who has spent six years dismantling her online for clicks. She connects instead with a seventeen-year-old cancer survivor wearing a T-shirt with her own licensed face printed on it. Forty phones catch it from forty angles. By morning her sponsors are gone. Heart of Glass by Jennifer Hillier understands, better than most crime novels bother to, that this is now how a life ends: not with a weapon but with a clip.
The woman who threw the punch used to be Nicolette Montes of Seaside, Washington. She has spent two decades and a great deal of money making sure nobody knows that.
A Town That Cannot Afford the Truth
Seaside is fictional, borrowed from an earlier Hillier novel, and it is the best thing in this one. It sits on the Washington coast around an amusement park that has just reopened after a decade of disgrace, and its entire economy is a bet on a good summer. The murder rate is roughly twenty times what a place this size should carry. Nobody local says so.
So when a body washes up on a gated community’s private beach, and turns out to belong to a woman who once won a fake earl on a dating show, and when a second former reality contestant is reported missing from a highway rest stop, the chief of police does not want those facts printed anywhere near each other. He asks a reporter, as a personal favour, to hold off. She agrees, and extracts a price.
This is the most persuasive argument Heart of Glass by Jennifer Hillier makes, and its coldest: that the most dangerous institution here is not a predator but a town council with a season to protect, and that a place will quietly decide how much truth it can afford, then round down.
Against that runs the older business. Twenty-five years ago, a fifteen-year-old girl went to a drive-in with her two best friends and a man in his late twenties, and did not come home. The case closed fast, on a confession. Now the man serving five life sentences is dying of lung cancer, has agreed to sit for a streaming docuseries, and says on camera that he killed four.
Heart of Glass Runs Five Registers at Once
The construction is ambitious. Present-day chapters follow the reporter who never escaped and the star who did. Flashbacks give the summer of 2001 from inside the friendship, where cruelty and loyalty are plainly the same substance. Transcript interludes let the dying man answer a young producer’s questions with the unhurried nastiness of someone with nothing to trade. And a fifth thread comes from a locked cabin, in the voice of a woman missing for six years who still narrates her days in the register of the influencer she used to be, hashtags and all.
That last strand carries the book. It ought to be a stunt. What it is instead is a woman using the only voice she has left to insist she is still someone: a dry joke about her captor, then a hashtag that is simply the wish to see her family. She is funny in a way that keeps stopping being funny. The passage where she coaches a newly arrived captive through the stages of grief, having lived all five herself in order, is the strongest thing Heart of Glass by Jennifer Hillier contains.
Nobody Here Gets to Stand Outside It
What raises Heart of Glass by Jennifer Hillier above its premise is the refusal to let its heroine be innocent of the machinery it is attacking.
The reporter’s real income comes from writing anonymous, exceptionally vicious recaps of a reality show. One of the women she takes apart every week is the friend she has not spoken to since they were fifteen. Nobody knows this, including the friend, including her editor, including the blogger who publishes her.
Hillier does not resolve this with a confession scene. She resolves it with a phone call in which the mother of a missing woman describes, at length and without any idea who is listening, exactly what people like this reporter did to her daughter and what it nearly cost. The line is held. Nothing is said. It is the best-judged moment in the novel.
There is a companion thread, quieter and uglier, about a teacher whom every adult in town names as their favourite, and about the useful cover a reputation for caring deeply about one’s students can provide. The book is unsparing about how long such a man can work, and about how many people will find it more comfortable to keep remembering him fondly.
What Jennifer Hillier Leaves Unexplained
The reservations about Heart of Glass by Jennifer Hillier gather in the last third:
The modern antagonist is a void — unidentified, unexplained, and finally uninteresting in a way the novel seems to intend and does not survive.
His partner gets a paragraph. A gesture toward soulmates and fate stands in for a psychology, which is nowhere near enough weight for the role.
Fortune does the plotting. A trusted source turns out to be precisely the wrong person; a convict happens to have shared a cell with exactly the right one; a diary yields a signed account at the moment one is needed.
The two halves are joined by theme, not cause. The old cover-up and the new abductions share a map rather than a mechanism, and you can see the weld.
The finish absolves everyone. A group decision to lie is enormously satisfying, and wipes out the moral debt the book has spent three hundred pages accumulating.
There is also a slack middle of interviews, files and phone calls, where the story is gathering rather than moving.
Readers wanting a comparable friendship soured over decades should try Bye, Baby by Carola Lovering; those after the suburban strain of the same rot will find it in You Deserve to Know by Aggie Blum Thompson. Anyone arriving at Heart of Glass by Jennifer Hillier new to this writer should be told that Jar of Hearts is her tightest novel, and that Wonderland takes place in this same town and accounts for the scandal the locals here keep declining to name.
Where It Leaves You
The most surprising relationship in the book is not a romance. It is a woman in her late thirties sitting across a kitchen table from the father who terrorised her childhood, twenty-five years sober now, working at a lumberyard and riding the bus, while a glass of vodka sits untouched between them. He does not ask forgiveness. He puts a sobriety chip on the table and asks her only to reach day two.
It should be sentimental. It is not, because the novel keeps refusing to say whether he has actually changed, and because his daughter refuses to decide.
That reluctance is the register Heart of Glass by Jennifer Hillier is best in: people who cannot be sorted into the deserving and the undeserving, in a town that has always preferred the sorting done quickly and out of sight. The killer at the end is a disappointment. Almost nothing before him is. And the last thing this long, angry, uneven book does is give a murdered girl back the small facts about herself that twenty-five years of true crime had no use for.
Read the cabin chapters slowly. They are the ones that will still be there in a year.